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legionofpotatoes · 3 years

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I love your art, it is very detailed in a neat way. Was wondering how you got started making it as a source of income? How did you get your first paid work, I'd love some advice on how to get started, if that's ok

Thank you. Of course it's okay, although I doubt I have enough work experience in art to really delve into this. I only went full freelance this year, and had been juggling art as a side hobby until then. If you're still interested in my somewhat narrow perspective, and are okay with my long-winded rambles, I'll give it a shot:

So to answer your question fully, I'll describe how I started and move into personal advice and learnings later on. As a disclaimer, I am a white cishet dude in my late twenties with a moderate cocktail of mental illnesses, but overall I can pass for a functioning adult so a lot I have to say may come laced with privilege I cannot fully identify.

So uhh I began drawing in around 2012? I think? Maybe halfway through 2011? And I mostly made fanart for things I enjoyed and tried to branch out in communities that felt nourishing to my style and interests (I caught a bug for alt posters and enjoyed mainstream movies so I spent a long time on posterspy early on). There were a handful of opportunities that came from there but I could only accept a couple because of primary workplace commitments. Still, it showed that networking in a focused community was definitely a good place to start; I myself have huge trouble committing to social networks and really staying socially active, but I knew it was an essential ingredient in succeeding so I tried to make myself be involved in challenges and art support trains etc. as much as I could.

In parallel to all that I also ran a few third party online stores (redbubble, teepublic) for disposable income and would sometimes, if rarely, hit around $100-150 a month from those sources combined. It is a sort of thing that requires helper accounts on other social media sites to promote it on, because the stores themselves have a huge volume of content that translates into low organic discoverability. Obviously it was never gonna be the way towards financial independence through art, and with community projects being few and far between, I opened private commissions in around uhhh 2017 I think, focusing on offering a few styles I knew I could do well, and sometimes operating in individual fandoms (it was mostly a bioware thing to be frank). But I had to close them back down after a year or so, again because of work-life conflict and how badly it was burning me out. The reason I kept trying to monetize this hobby is because I honestly hated what I did for my main job and wanted to see a way out in some shape or form in the future.

And then in 2020 I had to quit my main job altogether because of *gestures at pandemic* and deal with a mental breakdown from all the wonderful things it did to us and me specifically. I took a short break and decided to give art a shot full-time, and that was around May this year. I was planning on opening up commissions again (and I still am), but a few sudden opportunities that fell in my lap moved that timetable down and now I'm grateful to even be doing something I am getting adequately paid for.

So, with that somewhat limited perspective, here's what I've learned that I'd tell myself if I was just starting out:

1. Being a fan of something can be a shortcut towards effective networking kickoffs. Which are important evidently. If you love something and enjoy making content for it, join communities, settle into a combination of social media websites that feel right for those interests + your body of work + your inner rhythm, and try to play to content discovery as much as your mental health allows you to. Like I said, I know that I myself am incredibly bad at self-motivating to talk to people, so I found that synergizing common interests into fanart - which I enjoyed making anyway - could be a way to give myself a gentle nudge forward and build those bridges leading to community activities, which then net experience and coverage. Sometimes even freelance projects from official avenues. Again; picking the right spaces for what you're after is key. Companies roam twitter, concept art recruiters scour artstation or linkedin etc, instagram can land you private commissions and collab opportunities, so on and so forth. Find your niche and try to kick up dust. However...

2. I do not believe that any social profile can replace a good portfolio. The thing that made an immediate difference to me this year was building a coherent, simple website with my best work front and center and a contact form on top. Every single opportunity I got came from that form (maybe via twitter or instagram initially, but always sealing the decision after going through the website), so I firmly believe that showcasing your skills and portfolio in a visually arresting and user-friendly way is a big priority. I had some reservations about tackling that task but fortunately I had help from a savvy life partner and we slapped it together via wordpress in less than a day. Twitter/whatever social media is prevalent in your target groups is definitely important to get the right eyes on your shit, yes, but those eyes will then look for a second stop where your work and rates are more clear and concise. Simplicity is key imo, I cannot overstate this. So make a cute, simple portfolio!

3. Your skills and rates will grow and change as you do. Let them. Over the years I built several lasting professional relationships from my obsession over mass effect and kept getting opportunities both from bioware and their partner companies, some small and some a bit bigger. A one-off job earlier this year opened an unexpected door to another much larger commitment, and then the work I did there brought some attention from small businesses looking for commercial commissions. These were all incredibly different projects in terms of scope and budget, and I've been tackling them all on a case-by-case basis and slowly coming into my own irt my needs, rates, and SOW thresholds. It is still a work in progress (and a LOT of literal work as well), and very much a thing I struggle with in publicly marketing, which is why I felt a tad underqualified to answer your question in the first place (obviously I did not let that stop me). But what it means for me now is that I am rapidly developing into whatever my "version" of a functioning freelance artist is, and when the conditions for that guy are met, I need to be able to confidently plant myself and operate from that space despite past precedents. Do not let anyone bully you into downpricing what you yourself perceive as legitimate products of personal growth and development. Speaking of which...

4. The shitty challenge of turning envy into inspiration, and paddling outside your comfort zones in full riot gear. it is hard, but realizing that being a miserable, self-hating artist in my early days got me nothing but more misery back was the first real step I took and what truly blew the hinges off. I was just not pleasant to be around, I would badmouth my work all the time, and it all somehow made sense in my broken mind because the validation I sought was purely external and the way I sought it was through eliciting sympathy via self-victimization (even when I made something objectively nice). It all led fucking nowhere. Except perhaps to my own narcissism that I one day managed to identify and start managing. So I started looking at things that made me seethe with envy and calmly deconstruct and figure out their inner workings instead, do studies, and find nuggets of inspiration or discover new ways to approach rendering or building up specific elements. It was an application of analytical diligence to what I wanted to be a purely emotional, esoteric workflow, but that I deep down knew wasn't. Art is a discipline and a skill, and maybe it isn't a straight line, but you gotta find some line to thread nevertheless. Being self-hating was almost an identity I had to break out of, and despite it still being like, 4-5% there? I realize its cause and effect on me, my work, and those around me, so it is with a conscious choice that I gently set it aside when I work and especially when I learn. It won't always stay quiet, but the effort is the difference. Your doors towards accepting true growth and venturing into uncharted territories, art styles, and networking will really open from there. But there's a huge caveat...

5. Toolsets, accessibility, privilege, and all the good things that enable artistic expression and profitability are not given equal to all. you might do all the mental work I mentioned to be ready to rock and roll and learn and draw your way out of anything, but digital art is a fucking money pit that asks almost too much at times. I don't got a good case study here but identifying and ensuring accessibility to the tools you need to do your best work is, like, super important. The ergonomics can improve as you make money and settle into the job, but the basics have to be made available to you. And some of that might not even be under your direct control. That can be anything from pen tablets to software subscriptions to opportunities in hiring sullied by sexism or what have you. You gotta navigate all that through careful networking and money/time management. I don't do a good job of devoting specific slices of time to work/study, and my primary clutch is iPad software which went from a good deal to a nightmare scenario over the years. So all I can say here is do what I didn't; network, invest in a PC/tablet, and pick a software you'll learn that won't burn a hole in your pocket.

6. Be nice to work with? This one is hard to articulate and has landed my own ass in hot water in my early years because of how socially inept I am, but nothing is more worthwhile than being.. like. a good person to work with. That can be anything like meeting deadlines, or sometimes missing them but eloquently articulating why, being generous in early stages, being communicable and not too wordy in your emails, having a good grasp on abstract artistic concepts and how to describe them in simple terms, having a clear, laid out framework of your working rates in commercial and non-commercial projects and sticking to those guns with grace, understanding when you need to say no and saying it well, the works. Just being nice. Sometimes that might mean going headstrong with something you believe in, or simmering down and sucking up to the big man, all relative and adaptive. Part and parcel of the service provision dance that we all have to do in order to make bank. Know your lines here, obviously, and don't like. work for nazis. or uh.. *shudders* exposure. but be nice and empathetic and communicable and word will travel eventually. Skill may be in abundance these days, but good people are most certainly not, and capitalism has a way of bubbling up scarcity. Grim, but uh, them's the breaks.

I know I'm ultimately telling you to like. Have a body of work, make a portfolio, grow, and network. But that's really how I see it for now. And being nice can be a cherry on top that sets you apart, along with the inherent irreplaceable voice of your artwork. I think I rambled on enough, but if there is something specific you need my help with, even if you want to come off anon and talk in private, please feel free.

#anon #asks #long post #sorry I cant actually condense ideas better :(

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balioc · 4 years

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This is a complicated thought that deserves a complicated exploration, but right now it’s getting a scattered throwaway Tumblr post.

Superstimulus is always a failure mode of invention. Sometimes it turns out that getting what we want is hard, but exploiting a glitch in our desire-fulfillment sensors is much easier. This is very bad. It means that you land in an equilibrium where you’re perpetually unsatisfied, but it’s very hard to do anything about it, because casual analysis will always suggest that the only promising paths away from dissatisfaction are...the ones that get you yet more superstimulus. Which doesn’t actually help.

(I think it’s important to frame this as a disconnect between desire and satisfaction. A lot of superstimulus discussion tends to suggest that superstimulus indulgence is actually Desire-Fulfillment Run Amok, and that the thing being sacrificed is some other, higher, nobler value. Which tends to result in people saying “what if that other value is actually bogus and I should just get what I want?” Which is usually fair. Those who go around clucking about their pet higher nobler values...well, they rarely do a good job of meta-ethical outreach. But this all misses the point in a serious way. If your superstimulus is leaving you feeling like you’re thriving and fulfilled, then sure, it’s presumptively fine, don’t worry about it. The reason that superstimuli so often aren’t fine is that they prevent you from getting what you want, and make it difficult to fix that.)

************

I am deeply scared of artificial celebrity. I think it is a superstimulus for an aspect of human well-being that matters deeply, which we don’t understand very well and never have, and it is capable of wreaking havoc on us before we have any cultural defenses at all.

We’ve had partial hybrid artificial celebrities for a long time. On the one hand, it’s been true for ages that Hollywood stars and Japanese idols etc. have their “personal lives” managed, edited, and publicized to the point that they’re as much like fictional characters as they are like flesh-and-blood humans. On the other hand, it’s also been true for ages that fandom and comparable social structures have encouraged particularly-obsessive particularly-susceptible people to develop parasocial relationships with actual fictional characters.

These social technologies are...not bad, not exactly, but scary. But their techno-social limitations limit how much they can act as superstimuli, at least to some extent. We all know that actors and idols are ultimately real people we don’t know, with real lives and real thoughts of their own, and that limits the extent to which we can direct our thoughts and our feelings towards them. Inversely, society ultimately doesn’t provide very much support at all for caring deeply about fake humans from art and media (outside a few narrow social environments), and that also limits the damage here.

But we’re starting to combine these things. We’re starting to say “here are some fictional people, they’re going to be presented as though they were real people, we encourage you to think of them as real people and to care about them in the way you’d care about real people.” Vtubers and ascended-mascots like Hatsune Miko are the beginning of it, although I’m sure we’re not too far from the first genuine artificial musicians and/or artificial actors.

************

What’s the problem? Why should we think of this as a superstimulus?

It really matters to [most] humans that they been seen, that they be understood, that they be cared about for what they truly are (...or for what they believe themselves to be, the interaction between those things is complicated). That they be validated, if you want to use that lingo. This is a lot of what’s going on at the top of the Maslow hierarchy.

((IN BEFORE CERTAIN GRIPES: Yes, there’s a certain kind of iron-minded sagacity that allows you to validate yourself and tell the rest of the world to go hang. This is a very good thing to cultivate, if you can, especially if you’re the sort of person with a deep and expansive need for validation. But that is a difficult skill, it is always going to be as specialized and rare as any other form of mental discipline, and for social-engineering purposes it doesn’t matter.))

There are ways in which validating each other, in that sense, often turns out to be hard and counterintuitive. We are creatures of limited powers, who so often fail to live up to the ideals and narratives and personal myths that we want others to recognize and glorify. Our lives so often fail to provide any real scope for our dreams and aspirations, which makes it difficult to see and honor those things in ourselves, let alone in the people around us. Etc.

Finding a good way to deal with this is, I posit, a proper tentpole psycho-social project for a civilization that is rapidly overcoming the limits of material hardship. It’s an exciting challenge!

But our attempts to meet that need, for each other, can be hijacked by superstimulus. Just like our attempts to eat, to have sex with each other, etc.

Celebrity is a partial superstimulus. Celebrities essentially get a psychic force-multiplier from their fame. They are orders of magnitude more influential and more socially-powerful than any “real” people whom we know. So they seem like they matter more, to our social-politics algorithms. So their traits and quirks seem more defining and more noteworthy, and their stories seem more relevant.

Unreality is also, potentially, a partial superstimulus. Fictional people can make for much better objects-of-validation than real people, because they are subject to fewer limitations. They’re always on-brand. They interact with their environments only in ways that emphasize who and what they’re supposed to be. They can keep having moments of incredible poignancy and symbolism, because some author can just make those up.

Unreal celebrities might constitute a full superstimulus. Unreal celebrities might be a lot better at getting us to care about them than we are ourselves.

I have nightmare visions of a world in which we toil endlessly at tasks that don’t matter to us, feeling irrelevant and empty and mostly-unreal ourselves, while we lavish all the psychological validation we crave on fictional constructs designed to suck up all that energy without benefiting in any way from it.

#social engineering

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10-porgs-in-a-trenchcoat · 3 years

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Foxiyo Week: Trust

After her work at the Senate was concluded for the day, Riyo made her way to the Coruscant Guard barracks at Fox’s invitation … well, the tone of his message was less of an invitation and more of an insistence. She wasn’t quite sure what he had on his mind, and she hoped something wasn’t wrong.

He was waiting outside the barracks’ front entrance to greet her when she arrived. Since they were in public, with other troopers and military officials buzzing around, the two greeted each other formally.

“Commander, good evening,” said Riyo.

“Senator, if you would follow me please.” Fox replied.

Riyo nodded, and Fox turned around to lead her into the barracks. She followed him through the halls, past the mess and lounge, through a corridor at the far end of the building. On the other side of the corridor was a shooting range. Durasteel walls divided long narrow lanes, the start of which was marked with a white line on the ground approximately a hundred meters from the wall. The far walls and the walls that divided each lane were ray shielded, presumably to absorb stray blasts that missed their marks. The range was empty, except for a few droids cleaning up pieces of targets in some of the lanes.

Once they were inside, Fox shut the door to the range, entered a code in the keypad next to the door, and then removed his helmet.

“Fox, what is this about?” she asked him.

“I got you something,” Fox set his helmet down on a nearby bench and pulled a blaster out of one of his holsters. Unlike one of his military-grade DC weapons, it was a small sleek silver pistol.

“You got me a blaster?” Riyo asked, raising an eyebrow. “I don’t know how to shoot.”

It dawned on her, the reason for Fox’s invitation.

“Fox, with the local police, the Senate Guard, and you and your brothers, I don’t think I need –“

“Riyo, please listen.” Fox interrupted her as he took a step closer. “In the time we’ve known each other you’ve infiltrated a Separatist ship with Commander Tano, been taken hostage by bounty hunters, and the Separatists attacked the city’s power grid. Either you find danger or danger finds you. I want you to be able to protect yourself … in case I’m not there.”

That phrase, in case I’m not there, and the implications it carried hung in the air between them. She looked over Fox’s face, seeing the sincerity and concern in his eyes as he held out the blaster to her. Her experience with a blaster was limited, a skill she never felt the need to master since she did have armed guards throughout her political career. Yet the war had come a little too close to home for comfort. He was right, and she knew it.

“All right.” She took the blaster from Fox and looked it over, wrapping her hand around the barrel and examining the trigger.

“First rule: always assume the safety’s off. It’s right here, by the way-“ Fox pointed to the safety switch on the side of the barrel. He showed her how to turn the safety on and off by rotating the switch back and forth, and she repeated the motion after him.

“Next rule: don’t point that at anyone or anything you don’t intend to shoot.” He went over to the control panel by the nearest lane and pressed a couple of buttons. A floating circular target descended from the ceiling, hovering ten meters away from the white line at the start of the lane.

“And I pull the trigger to shoot? Sounds easy enough.” Riyo walked up to the white line, holding the blaster in one hand as she raised it above eye level and pointed at the target.

“Riyo, wait –“

She aimed the best she could and pulled the trigger. A blue bolt fired from the barrel, with only a little kickback. The bolt whizzed right over the target and hit the ray shield against the far wall.

“And my next rule: wait for me to explain how to use that thing before you start firing away,” said Fox.

“Oh, sorry,” said Riyo nervously.

“Ah it’s all right, I’ve made my fair share of rookie mistakes. Let’s start with your stance.”

Fox nudged her legs and feet into place gently with his own feet, then used his hands to adjust her shoulders and hips so they were square with one another. Even though he was only touching her like that to make her firing stance the best it could be, her breath hitched, and something fluttered in her stomach. She wondered if he was feeling something similar, or if one of the benefits of his training was that he could compartmentalize and keep his focus on the task at hand.

He then came around behind her back, leaning in close as he guided her hands with his own to readjust her grip on her blaster. She felt the hard surface of his breastplate against her back, and his chin briefly brushed against the hair on the top of her head. He also stole a second to hold her hand in his own before placing it at the base of the grip.

Perhaps he wasn’t completely focused, Riyo thought. A warm flush bloomed in her chest and rose to her face. It didn’t matter if she was an ace sharpshooter at the end of his lesson, since she relished the closeness between them. It didn’t come as often as either of them liked. Maybe she would ask him to show her how to shoot a rifle next.

“And to aim -” Fox explained the best strategies for aiming that particular blaster since it didn’t have a scope attached to it. He moved Riyo’s hands with his own so the blaster aligned with her line of sight the way it needed to. As he talked he leaned his head over Riyo’s shoulder, his cheek lightly touching hers. Perhaps because of their closeness, Fox’s voice dropped in volume and register, and it sent a tingle down her spine.

Her mind was drifting away from his lesson.

“Got it?” Fox asked, bringing her back to the present moment.

“I think so.”

“All right, show me.” With that, Fox stepped away, releasing her from his grasp. Riyo suddenly felt vulnerable without him around her, but she couldn’t get too flustered or bothered. It wouldn’t do in an actual dangerous situation.

Taking Fox’s advice into account, she aimed for the target again and pulled the trigger. She hit the target on its edge, pieces of it shattering off and hitting the ground.

“Nice job!” Fox was back at her side near instantly, and he leaned in to give her a kiss on the cheek. She smiled in response, taking joy in how proud he looked.

“Now hit it in the center.”

Riyo wasted no time in aiming and firing. It took her a couple of misses, but she hit the target in its center, shattering it completely.

“Not even a shiny could have done it better,” said Fox happily as he leaned in again to kiss her on the lips. He pulled away and asked “Want to try from a little farther away?”

“Only if I get more kisses as rewards for good shots!”

“You know I’d kiss you any time for any reason or no reason at all,” Fox responded as he returned to the control panel and pushed buttons to bring down another target. The new target sat twenty meters away from Riyo. “But if it motivates you I’m happy to oblige.”

“Hmm, I wonder what I would get if I can hit a target from all the way back,” said Riyo with a hint of suggestiveness in her tone.

“Oh I’ll think of something,” said Fox. “But do it first. Give me reason to trust you can handle yourself with that, and you can trust me to make this all worth your while.”

Riyo smirked at him, then turned her attention back to her target. Knowing her, and knowing Fox, neither of them would be waiting for her to reach that goal before they got around to engaging in the implied activities. Still, she intended to put in some work before it was all said and done. She raised the blaster, aimed at the target, and fired.

#foxiyoweek2020 #foxiyo #fox x riyo #riyo x fox #riyo chuchi #commander fox #clone wars #star wars

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badger-writes · 3 years

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Star Wars OC Ship Week 2021 - for light and love

uhhhh Hello! 😄

This fic and all its chapters was written for Star Wars OC Ship Week's inaugural year 2021, an event spotlighting OCxEC romances & platonic friendships helmed by @findswoman! It's also the first time I've personally ever taken part in an event week so I hope I do a good job! 😅

Whether you're a High Republic fan or you just want to see the big lizard get smooches, hope you enjoy! Leave comments and kudos if you do! Looking forward to sharing all I've written over the course of the week w/ y'all!

1 - How They Met

It all started, as these things do, in a medical bay.

Kelto Lem, a Jedi healer, had been busying himself with organizing the implements and instruments of the first aid wing in the Halls of Healing. This was light work, and peaceful, which suited him fine. Rarely, if ever, were there emergencies in the Jedi Temple of such scope and scale as to totally overwhelm the medical ward, and to the best of his recollection they had never occurred in the early morning, when dew was still settled on the trees and grasses of Monument Park. This made it an optimal time for preparing the ward for most of the day’s eventualities well ahead of schedule; this making good sense to him, he settled into this habit as a padawan and had never quite given it up. In time, it became almost a meditative practice for him - refilling stores of fresh bandages, taking stock of available pharmaceuticals and herbal remedies, refilling the kolto canisters…

And so it was in the middle of this daily routine that he was interrupted by the door sliding open. He turned to look and nearly dropped the medical scanner he was holding - for two reasons.

The first: his guest was built like a permacrete E-Web bunker. Broad and tall, with an implied physicality that not even Jedi robes concealed, the visitor - a Trandoshan - strode into the ward with an aura of stern command, stolid orange eyes locking upon Kelto almost immediately. His emerald scales shone with a slight luster as he walked, the claws of his toes clicking against the tile floor, until he came to the edge of the biobed in the center of the room less than a foot away from the resident healer. The sheer weight of his presence made Kelto feel small by comparison - he, a shorter pale-scaled Rodian with stripes of deep blue running along his jaw and neck, who wore a satchel of first aid essentials on his hip everywhere he went and tied back his spines in a long, narrow topknot ending in a spiky pom where they escaped the hold of the strip of linen which restrained them.

The second: he was covered in scorchmarks.

“Star’s End,” Kelto said, when he could finally get his (dry, dry) mouth to work correctly. “What in the world happened to you?”

The Trandoshan rumbled, mouth pulling to one side in chagrin. It was a deep, bassy sound, and it landed straight in the pit of Kelto’s stomach.

“A… mishap with the duelling droid,” he grunted, in the sibilant speech of his species. “I was not focused. Lost sight of my present. It seized the opportunity, as you can see,” he added, gesturing to his scorched robes.

“You were training? This early? Chee,” Kelto said, shaking his head. “And I thought my morning habits were odd - jump up on the bench, here, I’ll patch you up.”

He turned away to fetch some burn relief supplies, piling them on a tray. When he turned back, the Trandoshan had sat upon the biobed - and his tunic was resting carefully folded on the bench beside him.

“Ahghg,” he said, and everything on his tray rattled as he short-circuited.

The Trandoshan gave him an odd look. “Yes?”

“Oh, nothing. Nothing. I’m fine,” Kelto stammered. “Let me just, uhhh… set this down here.”

He let the tray’s repulsorlifts catch it in midair, so that it would hover at his side. Then he took a ball of fluff and daubed it in a squat open vial of kolto, letting the excess drip off and trying not to think too much about the barrel-chested masterpiece of physicality sitting just within arm’s reach to his right.

“So, how did this happen, Master …?”

“Knight, actually,” the patient replied. “Not master - not yet, anyway. And as I said, I was training.”

“Only a Knight? ...Well, I guess if you were a Master, you wouldn’t have ended up - err, you know what, forget I said that.”

With kolto-ball and medigauze dressings in hand, Kelto turned to his patient and gave him a quick once-over. There were injuries in areas roughly corresponding to the placement of scorch marks on the surface of his clothes, but fortunately, most of them didn’t seem too severe - the robes acting as a layer of insulation against the worst of it. Quite intentionally, he started on the outside limbs, an attempt to spare himself another hot flush provoked by looking straight on at his patient’s torso. Sskeer didn’t even flinch when he touched the wet medical fluff against an abrasion on the side of his arm.

“I train on one or two levels above the normal training setting,” the Trandoshan offered, by way of explanation. “Thus, my injuries.”

“Ah,” Kelto murmured, mostly to himself. “A masochist.”

Sskeer grunted reproachfully. “The training settings are designed to hold back. There will be no such reprieve in the field. Therefore, I train the body to anticipate the presence of harm - to become numb to its threat, and then, to surpass it.”

“So you’re fine with the pain?”

“Pain can be ignored. And my people have thick hides. I endure.”

“Well, I’m no duelist, but in my estimation you could probably stand to bump back down a few levels,” Kelto observed, winding a bandage around his forearm. “At least until you can defeat one of those saber-happy droids.”

Sskeer hrrred. The sound landed in Kelto’s gut again. “Bold words from a nurse.”

“Bold enough to be a Knight, like you.” The Rodian retorted, flashing him a smirk - and turning away immediately when the sensation of being perceived became too much. (His cheeks were so warm - was it supposed to be so hot in here?) Falling silent, he took one of Sskeer’s wide, thick-fingered hands in his own, turning it to inspect the green welt on its back.

“I did not realize you had risen to Knighthood as well,” the Trandoshan offered as Kelto dressed his injury. “If I offended, it was not by intent.”

“It’s fine. I’d rather people forget, honestly. Most people, they see a Jedi and think, ‘wow! Laser swords! Magic powers!’ - but that’s… never really where I felt comfortable.”

“You feel your place is here.”

“It’s where my talents lie, I think. I’ve sort of been drawn to the healing halls ever since I left the creche. And… well, to be honest, I like being able to help people doing this. So… I guess it’s true what they say, about the Force having a path for us all, and all that.”

Sskeer hummed. “That is good.”

“Yeah, and I remember when I was little, Master Rancisis came by the ward and said a-- I’m sorry, am I rambling? I’m rambling, aren’t I? I’ll just shut up and tend you--”

“It’s fine.”

“Are you sure? I mean, I just dropped basically my whole backstory on you--”

“It’s fine,” Sskeer said - firmly, but patiently. “Really.”

And Kelto believed him.

It’s funny, he thought suddenly, how quickly you can get comfortable with someone else. A moment ago he could barely stand to meet Sskeer’s gaze - now, though, he could look him straight in the eye without feeling like wilting. Sskeer had surprisingly deep eyes, he noticed, for how small they were. Deep and dark. Like he could dip into his pupils and fall forever --

Oh gosh, there’s a huge green mark right on his temple. How did he miss that??

Kelto dunked a fresh puffball in the healing fluid and held it up to the Trandoshan’s brow, cradling it in his long, sucker-tipped fingers. This time, when it touched his skin, Sskeer flinched and barely suppressed a hiss. On instinct, Kelto shushed him - a habit picked up from soothing much younger patients, when he got his start tending the younglings’ skinned knees and broken bones.

“This one’s not so bad, I think,” he murmurs. “Just needs a little kolto to help keep it clean. Just put some ice on it every few hours for the swelling and it’ll go away soon.”

“And this?”

“Hm?”

Sskeer gestured again to a long line of angry green flesh across his trunk.

“OH Force,” the Rodian cried, slapping a hand against his forehead. “I completely missed that somehow, thank you so much, I’m so sorry. Gods, I’ll get right on that--”

The Trandoshan surprises him with a chuckle. “Rather absentminded for a healer, aren’t you?”

“D-don’t judge!” Kelto sputters. “I’ve been distracted.”

“By what, exactly?” Sskeer asked, with a smirk.

“... J-just lie all the way down, please?”

Sskeer leaned back onto the biobed, hands resting behind his back. Now the whole of his broad, stocky abdomen lies prone under the glowlights, throwing the long diagonal burn across his trunk into stark, unmistakable relief.

“Why is this one so much worse,” Kelto wonders aloud.

“I wouldn’t call it ‘worse’. As I said, I endure.”

“I’m sorry, this doesn’t look like a giant, stinging saber-welt to you?” Kelto peered closer at the mark, hesitantly plying the flesh of the Trandoshan’s belly under his fingers. “...Actually, wait. This is almost a first degree burn. What kind of training saber makes marks like these?”

Now it was Sskeer’s turn to fall quiet and avoid eye contact.

“...You… did something pretty dumb, didn’t you.”

“...When my performance against the droids began to suffer, I… disabled some of the limiters on the droids,” Sskeer growled, at length.

“Y-you did WHAT?”

“I thought it would motivate me to improve,” he shrugged.

“So when I called you a masochist earlier and you didn’t really deny it--”

This time, Sskeer almost snarled. “It’s no crime to seek out a proper challenge.”

“Oh, and if every adrenaline junkie Padawan jumped off the High Council Tower, you would too?”

“Will you just stop arguing and fix this?”

“I--” Kelto groaned. “Okay, whatever, big guy. Just - just hang on.”

He arranged his hands on either side of Sskeer’s wound - one above on his chest, one below on his stomach. Then he sucked in a deep breath through his snout and released it slowly, letting his eyes fall shut as he exhaled.

He was panicking, he knew. Overcorrecting. There was no reason to take things this far when he was literally standing in a room filled with other, more practical solutions - and certainly not over something so silly as a shouting match with a Knight he barely knew. But by now, good sense and training had momentarily fled him.

Here, in this moment, Kelto sank into the Force and let himself be guided by the simple instinct to help.

He took another slow breath in, and out, and began to concentrate.

And then…

Sskeer sensed it before he saw it. He craned his neck over his chest to see - and rose up on his elbows, watching intensely.

With preternatural speed, the hideous burn across his torso lightened, shrank - and then vanished. In its place only unblemished scales remained.

Like he’d never even been touched.

Kelto let out one final, explosive breath - and almost collapsed. Sskeer jolted to his feet and grabbed his arms, cradled his back in one arm, steadying him on his feet until he could recover.

“Nice catch,” Kelto panted, when he’d finally recovered.

Sskeer was looking at him differently, the Rodian noticed through the blur of lightheadedness. Looking with him with something like awe.

“That was… quite a feat,” the Trandoshan noted. “It seems you were correct to follow the path of the healers.”

“Y-yes, well,” Kelto murmured sleepily, “we all have our own special talents.”

His eyes trailed back to Sskeer’s chest, fingertips idly following their gaze down his trunk. They tickled, just slightly; Sskeer registered an unexpected, but not wholly unpleasant shiver down his spine.

“Think we’re all done now,” the Rodian mumbled. Then his big, sea-blue eyes blinked - slowly, then rapidly, like a Wookiee propeller-engine starting up - and he realized his hand was just shy of cupping one of Sskeer’s pecs.

“UM,” he said loudly, jumping away. “YEAH, so, all done. Clean bill of health. You should be completely fine within the next day or so, and then you can go get your butt handed to you by the training droids again, right? Yup, glad to help, have a nice day, May the Force Be With You and all that jizz, ahaha~”

The Rodian became a flurry of hyperactivity around the ward, re-stocking and re-checking shelves and cabinets for reasons Sskeer could not divine. To appear busy, he supposed - and discourage his continued presence.

It was, he decided, reather endearing.

Sskeer let the flustered healer flail a moment more before saying, “I don’t think you ever shared your name.”

When he looked over his shoulder, Kelto’s face looked as bright as a Life Day orb - only much, much greener. “Huh?”

“Force healing is no small feat,” the Trandoshan observed, slipping his tunic and tabard back over his shoulders. “To have seen it performed is a privilege; for something as small as my own self-inflicted injury, and after my own stubbornness - an honor.

“I’d prefer to thank you for it properly, and to apologize. But for that, I must ask your name.”

The Rodian stared. Then coughed, turning to lean back against the counter before him. “Uh, well… That’s … kind of you, but I - you know, we’re Jedi and all. W-we don’t really serve for gratitude’s sake.”

“For the sake of a fellow Jedi, then, and a friend?”

“…Friend?”

A bemused head tilt. “Are we not?”

“W-well, that’s moving a bit quickly, isn’t it? I mean - we don’t even know each other’s names.”

Sskeer stared.

“Sorry. Sorry. I’m not dumb, I swear, I’m just -- panicking.”

The Trandoshan gave him a funny look. (It was kinda cute, Kelto noticed, when his nose scrunched up like that.)

Just spit it out. Spit it out. Spit it out. You’re blowing it. Just spit it out spititout spititout---

“My name’s Kolto,” he said -- and groaned.

“Your name,” Sskeer echoed, “is...‘Kolto’?”

“Noooo, no, not ‘Kolto’ - Kelto! Kelto! My name is Kelto. Kelto Lem. I just - I’m just called ‘Kolto’. By - certain people.”

“Because… you work with kolto?” he ventured. “Or because it happens to sound similar?”

Kelto sulked, crossing his arms. “Because Torban Buck thinks he’s funny.”

Understanding dawned. “Ah. Yes, he certainly does.”

“Mmmmgh. Well, now that I’ve botched my own introduction, I guess you know me. So you can leave me to my shame, now, I guess.” Kelto returned to the business of managing the ward - opening and closing cabinet doors slightly harder, this time.

A wide, three-fingered hand landed on his narrow shoulder, making him jump.

“Thank you, Kelto Lem,” Sskeer said. “Truly, you’re a credit to the Order.”

His voice was deep and warm. Kelto swore he could feel his breath tickling his ear.

“A-anytime,” he replied, spine locking ramrod straight.

He senses Sskeer’s presence pass by behind him, and imagines it’s what little Rodian swamp-fish feel like when big surface trawlers pass by, and catch them in their wake. “And perhaps when I continue my training,” Sskeer added, “I will remember to return here, for my wounds to be dressed.”

“Orrr you could crush those droids and never need to come back here again!” Kelto shakily returned.

“I’m sure I could, at that,” Sskeer chuckled. And the door slides shut behind him.

The moment Kelto was certain he was alone, he took a little paper cup and pours himself a drink of cool sinkwater. It takes gulping down two full cupfuls before he cools down, sinking heavily on his elbows against the counter.

“‘Kolto’,” he muttered, scoffing. “God damn it.”

#StarWarsOCShipWeek2021 #star wars #the high republic #sskeer #original character #oc x canon #how they met #fanfic

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inventors-fair · 3 years

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Limited Engagement Commentary (Finally)

Trying to subtly slip this in before the commentary for this week’s challenge. Thanks again for your patience.

This Last week’s contest was a little bit different. Because the design space is narrow – and because the abilities tend to need lots of words – there was only a little bit of room to maneuver in, and yet (fortunately) there weren’t too many significant overlaps in the final designs. That said, it also means that many of the obstacles your submissions faced were similar, so rather than sound like I’m harping on about the same things, I’m going to take a less structured approach to my commentary this week. To that end, I’m also not going to spend time nitpicking templates for the draft effects, little used as they are. Anyhow, without further ado, we can dive in.

@aethernalstars - Whispergear Shifter

The callback to Whispergear Sneak here is cute, even if it did have me confusing which was which all week. The play pattern for this is to remove a relatively common card, and then you’re able to exchange it for one of three cards you chose not to include in your deck. There’s always a pretty high barrier to being worth not simply including a card you want (let alone three), and having to find both this and the card to activate it is probably difficult enough to make it not worthwhile in a lot of cases. The ideal use case would be to have lots of a single common that you would be playing anyway, and three situational cards that you wouldn’t want to mainboard, but even in that case I’m not totally convinced the value of ‘upgrading’ your playables into situational cards really makes the card worthwhile. It’s an interesting idea to add flexibility by accessing parts of your card pool you aren’t planning to play, this card just feels like it may introduce a few too many hoops to jump through to achieve that.

Anonymous - Soul Bargain

This is a really clever approach to a draft-matters removal. Black classically gets two-mana instant speed removal with relevant exceptions, and allowing your opponents to choose the exceptions based on their draft pools is such an interesting direction. There’s value both in revealing bombs (protecting your best cards, albeit with a high information cost) and in revealing commons (which also increases the value of those cards as they appear later in the draft). The biggest obstacle this one faces is tracking: seven different card names every time one of these is drafted is a lot of notation. Regicide required noting three different colors as it was drafted, and I would consider that about the most you would ever want to force players to track. If you could find a way to compress this down to track less information (treat the reveal like a vote, and only note the most voted for CMC or something), I think you’d have a really reasonable design on your hands.

@col-seeker-of-the-memiest - Preventative Reconaissance

This is a new take on white protection effects, protecting a player and their permanents from a specific set of cards your opponents reveal. I’m not sure whether it’s intended to be drafted early (to protect you from your opponents’ first-pick bombs) or late (to cover commons that will actually appear in more matchups), but I think that question is probably interesting enough to warrant the confusion. The bigger issues I see with this design are that it’s really narrow - effects like this don’t often make the cut in Limited to begin with, so it’s especially hard to imagine one that only works against one card per opponent being playable - and the amount of bookkeeping it demands in tracking seven essentially random card names. When you’re playing with this, you’ll likely find yourself (and your opponent) checking and re-checking your list of names every time an opponent plays a new threat. The end result is that this asks for a lot of attention during gameplay, but will rarely actually reward that attention in a meaningful way. The design asks some interesting questions, but I suspect the actual logistics of playing with it outweigh most of those benefits.

@deg99 - Lieske, the Collector

Interpreting Companion as a Limited-focused mechanic is an interesting take; it always struck me much more as a Constructed mechanic (since you have more control over your deck construction), with the occasions that you make Companion work in Limited being a fun exception. This card takes it in the opposite direction, having its Companion ability only able to be satisfied while drafting; indeed, all four of its abilities only function within the context of draft. The gameplay pattern this demands is that you remove creatures with desirable activated abilities rather than drafting them, and that you remove three creatures with the same name to turn on Companion. I think my biggest issue is that I struggle to see how this is ever better than just playing the creatures you’re removing with it. You’ll rarely ever turn on Companion with this (not least of all because it broadcasts to other players when you’re about to), and whether you do or not, the picks that you invest in it to make it playable should probably just be spent on cards that are playable themselves. I like the idea of a more Limited-oriented application of Companion, but I suspect there are other ways to approach that design space.

@dimestoretajic - Invoker of Sacrifice

I really liked what this one was trying to do, enough that seeing it in the workshop inspired a design of my own based on it. It’s a little hard for me to tell if the quirks of this one were conscious design decisions, or if they were attempts to make an initial design work without reconsidering the end result. Most cards like this that want to work only once simply turn themselves face down when you use them, and the only part of the chosen card you really need to note is its power; those two changes together would’ve streamlined the templating a lot. Also of note: this card is at its most interesting when it’s having you remove cards that could otherwise be playable for you, but the largest creatures you’re likely to see in draft will often be in green rather than red. That’s not to say the draft environment couldn’t have some high-power red things to tempt you with this, but it’s something to consider when your design starts pulling you in a direction like this one.

@fractured-infinity - Tibalt, the Chaosbringer

This is a pretty interesting card with a lot to evaluate: both how good it is when you bring in the three extra cards, and how good it is without them. Because this circumvents color requirements, it allows you to access cards you couldn’t just include in your deck anyway, but uses randomness as a cost for doing so. All of the mechanics of this card are easy to understand what they’re doing and work together in a cohesive way, which can be tough to do with 13 lines of abilities. The biggest obstacle this one faces is the same obstacle that any card that attempts to balance itself with randomness faces: if getting a free off-color bomb is the fun part it should probably do it more reliably, and if it isn’t then making it unreliable just means we’re allowing one in three games to not be fun. It does change the draft experience by allowing you to grab off-color bombs as you see them, but I’m not sure if that’s an improvement: draft relies on players getting passed the cards that only they can use, and this encouraging you to pick up those cards with no real downside seems disruptive to that process. That the ultimate and the downtick pull in different directions feels like interesting tension, but I think in practice it almost certainly just means that you won’t be using the ultimate. I would probably rearrange the uptick to make the loyalty counters dependent on exiling a card rather than the damage, that way ticking up to the minus (or the ultimate) actually requires you to reset the odds. There’s a lot going on for this card, as is always the case for planeswalkers, and a lot of it feels like good design work. Tibalt was a good choice for this kind of random effect, and I think with a little tweaking there’s probably something of value there.

@hiygamer - Leovold’s Enforcer

This design is encouraging you to include as many of your draft cards in your final deck as possible, generally lowering your average card quality to increase the quality of this one card. The ceiling is obviously quite high (a six-mana 20/20 with trample is very strong), but in a normal draft environment you’ll leave out 22 of your 45 draft picks (running the other 23 with 17 lands), making this nonfunctional without special consideration. Like others in this vein, it may work well with cards that remove picks from the draft altogether, though it would require a lot of support to remove enough to make this worth playing. The biggest issue this runs into is actually outside of draft: in Eternal and casual play, this is ‘just’ a six-mana 20/20, and while the theme for this week definitely encouraged you to look at cards through an explicitly Limited lens, it’s still important to consider what those cards do in other scopes. It’s generally more interesting (and safer) to reward players with extras that only work in the format than it is to assume the format and make downsides specific to it. Perhaps there’s space for a conspiracy (which are actually only playable in draft) that leans into similar space as this, as that would sidestep some of those issues.

@hypexion - Court Doppelganger

This is a cute take on a clone effect that is unique to Limited. I’m not sure why this one is a 3/3, as clones are typically 0/0 and this one doesn’t even have the downside of not having something to copy: as long as you noted a card while drafting, it just has access to that for 2UU, so also adding a floor of being a vanilla 3/3 seems unnecessary. I’m not a huge fan of the way cards like this encourage you to draft other player’s bombs - when another player in the draft pod watches you reveal an off-color mythic that would’ve been perfect for their deck that is now suddenly mono-blue for you, they’re going to know it was this card that undermined their draft - I think some restrictions as to what you can clone would go a long way. But the biggest issue that this one faces is actually logistical: this allows you to clone a card that exists somewhere within your deck without a point of reference, meaning that every time you play this card, you will need to call a judge to verify the Oracle text of the card it’s cloning. As a rule of thumb, any card that comes with a built-in judge call probably warrants a redesign to avoid that; something like one of our runners-up this week, which exiles the relevant card before the game for the ease of referencing it later on.

@i-am-the-one-who-wololoes - Riches to Rags

I think what I like most about this one is the way the in-game effect seems to align with the out-of-game effect - both effects encourage you to trash your two least favourite cards, either to or from two different places. Functionally, the out-of-game effect really doesn’t do anything: the last several picks in any pack aren’t much of a choice, so players always wind up with junk they would never play anyway. Each player choosing the two most worthless cards in their pool and shuffling them amongst nearby players doesn’t feel like a really meaningful decision, or that it’s likely to impact the games that follow in any real way. The design feels like there’s something to it, and perhaps with a few more restrictions it could create some more interesting scenarios with a similar framework.

@ignorantturtlegaming - Lutri, the Redeemed

I do love a good redemption arc (I assume that’s what the electricity in its paws is), and Lutri is definitely cute enough to deserve one. I like that this acknowledges some of the similarities of revealing cards before the game with the Companion mechanic, and it’s mindful to play in space that is familiar to Lutri as a character. This design actually comes so close to being especially interesting with a Commander Legends-style draft format, but because it actually casts the exiled card you wouldn’t get any extra value from additional castings of Lutri after the first. If it had used a format more similar to Arcane Savant, it would’ve been interesting in that sense...but that also highlights its biggest issue, simply that it feels very close to a card that already exists. That said, I understand most of the decisions that resulted in them being so similar, and I think with just a few changes you could carve out some space for this that Savant wouldn’t be able to touch.

@machine-elf-paladin - Prismatic Assistant

This takes what a lot of the other designs this week were doing, and pushes it in the opposite direction: looking at what you don’t have in your card pool. The obvious question is how big does this need to get to be worthwhile: if you play your entire pool, this would be a 4 mana 6/7, though that obviously impacts the average quality of your other draws. A four-mana 4/5 is pretty good by most colors’ standards, and that limits you to having two colors among your unplayables - so basically all of your pulls need to be in your colors. There’s a question of how many pool-removing cards you would need in a format to support something like this. I think the biggest issue is the logistics of revealing large numbers of possibly relevant cards from your sideboard - it’s correct for your opponent to want to record every card you reveal, even though the majority won’t ever be relevant. Lots of the designs this week struggled with managing the amount of information that they required to be tracked and shared, so I can’t be too hard on you, but it’s certainly something to keep in mind as you design cards like these.

@misterstingyjack – Coveted Bauble

As you probably noticed, your entry was actually surprisingly close to one of our winners this week, which you should take as a good sign! The idea behind your card was quite clever, and had it not been for its similarity to a winning design, surely would’ve been at least a runner-up. What gave the winner the edge over your Bauble was mostly the innovation of making the ability a keyword, but also a few logistical considerations that the winning version executed more cleanly. For instance, the only drafts that could reasonably be interpreted to have ‘turns’ are Competitive events with called (timed) drafts, with most casual events (like this would appear in) using zone, or even looser draft structures. Finding a way to make this ability work in those looser structures is admittedly tricky, but it was probably worth figuring out how to do.

@nicolbolas96 - Diplomatic Study

This one is also a lot like one of our winners this week, though this one plays up the advantages of trading more than either of the others. I quite like the flavour choices on this one, and I really like the design space of things that work best after having moved around the table a bit. The biggest frustration I have with this one is that because the upside is so big, it’s hard to imagine anyone feeling tempted to draft this in the first place - somebody has to, but nobody really wants to be the one stuck with it initially. I suppose it’s better the earlier in the draft you open it, but the card itself isn’t really the kind of game-winning bomb that would be likely to get traded for...well, a game-winning bomb. I think I’d like it if it offered a little more to incentivise taking it initially, so that trading it off is slightly more mutually beneficial when it inevitably happens. It’s worth noting that the “draft table” clause is kinda clunky, but I appreciate your trying to keep it reasonable for casual Constructed as well.

@partlycloudy-partlyfuckoff - Goblin Librarian

I saw your comment mentioning that you missed a line of text on the final version - I appreciate your pointing it out, as the design makes a lot more sense with that included. Missed lines don’t tend to win you prizes, but they do allow for better feedback. This is (supposed to be) a really cute design exploring how big of an advantage you have to offer for players to use their entire card pool. The flavour on this is top-notch, and the effect is interesting enough to make you wonder whether it’s worth trying. One clever quirk of the design is that it (almost) allows you to casually experiment with the Kablooey Decimal system, then switch back to your normal 40 if that isn’t working out. I would probably open it up to “card pool” rather than “cards you drafted”, both so that it theoretically works in Sealed (which this design can do more smoothly than most) and so that it includes basics you add to your pool after the draft (that’s the ‘almost’: since it doesn’t let you add basics, as written you do have to decide to include those in advance, but with a little tweaking that would be fixable). If I had any qualms, I do wish this had a slightly more meaningful in-game effect; I know it’s mostly there for the gimmick, but I think there’s flavourful mechanics that could make this card interesting even after the game begins as well.

@shakeszx - Chancellor of the Void

This wasn’t the challenge I expected to see a sixth Chancellor in, but I’m always a sucker for a good callback. That said, it’s important to recognise when making such a callback is valuable and when it isn’t. The Chancellor cycle has an identity as 4MMM creatures that have a small additional effect if you happen to have them in your opening hand. Now, this design does have an effect when it’s in your opening hand, but that effect doesn’t actually do anything when it’s revealed. What’s more, the whole card doesn’t do much of anything if it’s not in your opening hand: it’s a very hard to cast vanilla 4/4. On top of that there’s the concern that there’s never been a draft format where triple-colorless was a reasonably payable cost, as well as the logistical nuisance of your opponent counting your deck every time you reveal this card (to ensure you’re not accidentally on 41+ cards). Overall I get the feeling that this design was torn between doing something interesting in Limited and calling back to an old cycle, and both of those goals just got in the way of really delivering on the other.

@snugz – Sokenzan Onsen

I appreciate the attempt at subtlety, though I did try to let on that subtlety wasn’t expected with this week’s contest: I gave you free rein to explicitly reference elements of Limited. Unfortunately, it’s hard for me to agree that minimum deck size manipulation is primarily a Limited thing after watching Yorion terrorise Standard over the past six months. Challenge aside, something like Yorion’s success proves that for certain decks (namely Control variants) there is relatively little cost to adding extra cards, and in this case five cards is an especially small hoop to jump through. Logistically, it seems a little unpleasant to verify – when you play this on turn 3, your opponent suddenly needs to count your library, your hand, your graveyard, your battlefield, and anything you have in exile to make sure you actually had five over when you started. It’s honestly a pretty neat idea and I’d like to think there’s some design space for deckbuilding restriction duals, but I think there’s a little cleaning up to do on this one before it’s practical.

@starch255 – Shambling Scrapheap

I see what you were trying to do with this one: the balance between how many of these commons you keep in your deck (to increase how often you see it) and how many you leave out can create an interesting tension. I see why you say it’s most interesting in draft, as it’s certainly much less interesting as a 3-mana 4/4 that eats your sideboard slots. But even more than that I’d be worried about this in casual, where a card like this is actually liable to see play: where players are encouraged to collect them by the dozen, but where the result isn’t particularly fun when they do so. There’s definitely room in Magic for Relentless Rats-style cards that encourage players to collect lots of them, it’s just important to be mindful of what actually happens when a player finally ‘does the thing’, and whether what you’re subtly encouraging them to do makes the games where they do it more fun, or less.

@teaxch – Custodi Apocrypha

This is an interesting build-around rare that if drafted early allows you to really shape the rest of your draft around it, and automatically tells you something about the draft environment it must fit in. I think rare is probably the correct place for this to sit, both because it has a pretty huge color pie effect and because multiples in a single draft pod would create lots of competition for Auras. This is a solid design that I can imagine as part of an interesting draft format, and the only thing holding it back was that – as you noted – it’s just not doing anything especially breathtaking.

@thedirtside - Common Enemy

Thinking to use the other players in a draft pod (or sealed event) as a resource is a really clever take on this week’s challenge. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s a way that the rules can actually support “players from outside the game” - I’m afraid it’s something that will be relegated to silver border for some time. I think the closest you could come to this would be to do the vote as part of the draft process: that reliably gives you seven other players, and the game can reasonably obligate them to make a choice (whereas this design currently doesn’t do much if there’s no one to ask or they decline to choose). In practice, this card seems awfully swingy - often you’re going to have players outside the game simply picking a winner, as anything more than one outsider results in very large life total changes. There’s a slight templating hiccup here as well: this spell as written only has one target, so you’d have to do a little reconfiguring for a spell like this to determine the correct number of targets as you’re casting it.

#inventors fair #magic #mtg #custom magic card #commentary #limited engagement #3smuth

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financenfreelance · 3 years

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6 Tough Lessons Learned From Freelancing For 6 Years 💸💜

Here is a list of 6 tough lessons learned from freelancing for 6 years. These are some of the lessons that I had to learn the hard way. Don’t be dumb like I was! Learn from my freelancing mistakes.

💜 6 Lessons Learned from Freelancing

So… I have to let you in on a little secret.

This is probably a shock to no one, but I didn’t exactly hit the ground running when I first started freelancing. When I first started, I had to take several L’s in my beginning stages, and it was tough. Unfortunately, I had to learn it the hard way – through trial by fire.

I sucked at freelancing for a WHILE. There were so many mistakes made that I’m surprised that I stuck with it.. or made any money at all. I got serious about freelancing when I was too broke to move out from a toxic relationship… (story on how I went from broke to $1000 a week here) but for a good while, my freelance side hustle was a flop at BEST.

If you’re a beginner, learn from my mistakes.

Learn from my lessons learned from freelancing. Don’t be stupid like I was! You don’t have to learn the hard way to become a success. Here are 6 tough lessons I’ve learned from 6 years of freelancing.

“A smart man makes a mistake, learns from it, and never makes that mistake again. But a wise man finds a smart man and learns from him how to avoid the mistake altogether.”

Roy H. Williams

Related Article: Advice For Freelance Beginners

💜Lesson #1 – As a freelancer, you are now your own business, NOT an employee

And don’t let anyone treat you as such.

The first lessons learned from freelancing is this. Hear me loud and clear: You’re the boss who is running things now.

Of course, you will have clients to please, and you should go above and beyond on your services for them.

Also, make sure you are open-minded about the categories that require collaboration. Sometimes clients will have specific restrictions, times, and other requests or suggestions. But this my dear, is a business transaction first and foremost.

Be Your Own Boss

You are the one who dictates your schedule, your pay, and your limitations (more on that later.) The on who decides your working conditions is YOU. They are not hiring you as an employee and you are not at their beg and call.

“At the end of the day, I’m the biggest boss. I’m self-made.”

– Rick Ross

Last but not least, as a business, make sure you set yourself up for success. Be sure to check out: How to Set Goals for Your Freelancing Business as well.

💜Freelance Lesson #2 – Some work isn’t worth the money

The next tough lesson learned from freelancing is this:

Do not work with problematic people.

The word “NO” will become your biggest ally when your freelance career gets going. Trust me, some work is not worth the money.

Sometimes, this will take some trial and error before you get the hang of it, but I realized that the clients that I REFUSED define me just as much as the clients I took on.

Freelance Client Red Flags

If you see any of these red flags, consider turning down this client:

Client is nit-picking constantly and unreasonably

Your client is trying to lower your rate

They are unprofessional, dismissive

Client goes long periods of time without responding to you or paying you

The client is overly critical, hot headed, or just plain mean

Client and you just don’t mesh well

They withhold payment from you or they are a hassle to collect payment from

You feel uncomfortable IN ANY WAY talking to this client.

Avoid Stressful Clients Like the Plague

If you feel like this client is going to be trouble in any way… DON’T DO IT.

I have gained so much peace of of mind by firing and rejecting problematic customers. Time is money, so don’t spend valuable time on stress.

Choose to work with people who you have a good rapport, who are polite, and who has mutual respect with you. Having “no client” is actually 100 times better than having a bad one.

“When two people talk with mutual respect and listen with a real interest in understanding another point of view, when they try to put themselves in the place of another, to get inside their skin, they change the world, even if it is only by a minute amount, because they are establishing equality between two human beings.”

– Theodore Zeldin

💜Lesson #3 -SERIOUSLY- The ability to say no is a BLESSING

Another serious lesson learned from freelancing was this: I am not going to be able to be everything to everybody.

This is why you have a unique specialty and skillset. Both you and your client will have a better experience if you are able to set boundaries from the beginning.

Back Away From The Money!

I know it sounds crazy to turn down the money, but like I’ve said before, some money just isn’t worth it. Some jobs will cost you more in the long run than they are worth. Let me give you an example.

When I first was starting out as a graphic designer, even though I had narrowed a specialty, people asked me for all kinds of things. These requests ranged from 3D modeling, video editing, and logo designs, even though I was more of a print designer.

One of my biggest mistakes

One of my biggest mistakes was taking on a video editing project. I had very little experience with video, but I had built a relationship with a client and I didn’t want to turn down an opportunity when I desperately needed the money. My lack of experience should have been my first clue not to take it. The second clue should have been that this was a rush project, and I would be burning myself out to get this thing done. I needed a miracle, but all I had was elbow grease and a stubborn will.

I sleeplessly worked on the project for 12 hours, and it looked like crap. Stupid decisions were made- I was an idiot because had only billed the client for 4 hours. I ended up wasting time, money, and effort on a project that was not meant for me. Not to mention… with such a terrible video, I never heard from that client again—not even for graphic work.

Make sure you draw lines in the sand when possible. If a project isn’t right for you, send your client elsewhere. Manage your client’s expectations as well as your own. Don’t take on any work that you are not qualified for. Trust me.

💜 Freelance Lesson #4 – “That’ll cost you extra.”

I highly recommend that you become acquainted with “That’ll cost you extra.”

From the creators of “No”.

This phrase should be within an arm’s reach for when your client requests anything “beyond”.

Anything that is an emergency will cost you extra. Rush? That’ll cost you extra. Can we just add another… EXTRA. Make sure you have the proper upcharges in mind for any additions that may happen. Don’t be afraid to speak up for yourself and your business.

If you have a client that respects your time and you as a business, they will have no problems paying a fee if it is truly necessary. If not.. not to be rude, but it’s not your problem.

Tough Lesson Learned From Freelancing: Don’t Let It Slide

Trust me, do not think you are being nice by letting something slide once or twice for free. You will be hurting yourself in the long run, because that client will take advantage of your kindness. This will add extra stress to your job and could cause you to resent your clients.

I would also recommend that newbies check out this article for more tips: Freelancing Tips For Beginners: What I Learned My First Year

💜Lesson #5 – A good third of your time will be spent outside of your craft

Like we’ve discussed earlier, as a freelancer you are now the holder of your very own business.

This leads us to the next lesson learned from freelancing.

You will need to make sure that you stay on top of your day to day tasks. These tasks will include keeping track of your income and expenses, planning out your taxes, dealing with your client’s Human Resources Department or Payroll company, and countless other things.

Client communication will also take quite a bit of your time. You will need to make sure you are landing clients, communicating on project status, and keeping up work quotes and invoices. You will also have to stay on top of who has paid you and who hasn’t.

Lesson Learned From Freelancing: Bill for Admin Work

Make sure that you pad this business minutia into your pricing structure, so that you are still getting paid for this time.

Although this sounds stressful, it’s still worth it. The financial freedom that freelancing has allowed me has been invaluable. In addition, getting to make money doing a job that I love really overruled the minutia of business.

Adulting will sneak in through the cracks in all forms, so just make sure to stay on top of it.

💜Freelance Lesson #6 – Be Honest and Own Up to Problems

The final lesson is an important one, and it ties into some things that we’ve already discussed. Make sure you are honest with yourself and your clients.

This goes along with setting boundaries, being able to say no, refusing work that are outside of your scope, and knowing your worth. Be truthful, upfront, and forthcoming, and you will be successful at freelancing.

Not only will you manage realistic expectations for you clients, but you are prioritizing your own wellbeing. Never, ever over-promise and under-deliver.

When Problems Arise

Sometimes, the issue is a miscommunication, or sometimes it’s more serious. Bring things to your client’s attention as soon as it’s a roadblock for you.

The worst time to tell them is when a project is due tomorrow. Work together on these issues to make sure both you and your client is happy. Hey, customers are human too who f up just like the rest of us.

The good ones tend to be understanding as long as you are reasonable!

“I’m not perfect; I make mistakes all the time. All I can do is to try my best to learn from my mistakes, take responsibility for them, and do a better job tomorrow.”

– Lana

💜What It All Boils Down To:

When I first started freelancing, I was kind of a pushover. I let things slide, let people try to control me, and let them walk all over me.

Not anymore.

Throughout my career, I’ve learned to create boundaries and draw lines in the sand like I never have before in my life.

I learned how to speak up for myself and be an advocate for myself and my business, all while gaining respect from my clients and looking stunning in the process.

That is what being a boss is all about.

“Really, every day is the perfect day to boss up. Every day that you wake up is a perfect day to boss up. It’s all about continuing to put one foot in front of the next. That’s what it’s about. Whatever you think you’re going through, just put one foot in front of the next.”

– Rick Ross

Are you a newbie at freelancing? Check out The Ultimate Freelance Guide for Beginners

#freelance #freelancing #online business #make money 2021 #make money online #make money from home

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rpgmgames · 4 years

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February’s Featured Game: Ressurflection

DEVELOPER(S): charlottezxz ENGINE: RPG Maker MV GENRE: Fantasy, Cartoon, RPG WARNINGS: Paranoia, fear and tension, mild swearing and blood. SUMMARY: Ressurflection is a Fantasy/cartoon RPG set in the fictional universe of the Arbvar and taking center stage primarily at the coastal city of ‘Horizon Bluff’. Its story and game play are heavily character driven, with its narrative divided into two parallels told both within and outside the mirror itself. Ressurflection’s core themes draw from our inevitability of fearing death, and that at some point or another, we all must accept it, and to treasure what’s really important in the time that we have.

Our Interview With The Dev Team Below The Cut!

Introduce yourself! *charlottezxz: Hiya this is Charlotte, lead game developer for Ressurflection! I’m some silly, overactive drawing monkey who works a lot with Narrow on Ressurflection! I’m always sketching and conceptualizing monster bois, taking a lot of inspiration from various games, primarily monster hunter! I’ve had avid interest in the Indie scene for a while now and a lot of the great friends I've made have been due to it and a lot of my recent favorite games have come from it! I would have had Narrow say a few things here but he’s hiding in a corner somewhere!

What is your project about? What inspired you to create this game initially? *charlottezxz: Ressurflection started out as what can be described as two separate stories. Myself and Narrow wrote our own stories and every so often we swapped over ideas or combined them together with each other. One day I said to ourselves ‘You know what? This could work quite well as a game rather than just a story’ so eventually Ressurflection was conceived, around the idea of a mythical mirror capable ‘Ressurflection’ the title of the game. We’ve gone through quite a few iterations of the story before it came to its current form and to be honest if we even showed or compared them side by side they’d be pretty unrecognizable as the same thing except for certain characters, locations and the mirror itself to identify its primordial form having any kind of ancestral relevance to how it is today. As for what Ressurflection is about, I think our synopsis can get that across quite nicely! ‘Horizon Bluff has always annually held its ‘Legend of the Wyvern Glass’ festivities. The Wyvern glass was a long lost mythical mirror, once fabled for its power of ‘Ressurflection’ and coveted by a kingdom now all but gone. That is quick to change however with the arrival of the Roulette Runner’s circus to the coastal city of Horizon Bluff. Trouble is soon to set in motion not just the kingdom’s sudden reappearance but the entrapment of one of their own acrobats within the mirror silver. Yet things are soon to worsen...with the spread of a purple ‘corruption’ across the city and the fact that our most unfortunate trouper is far from alone within the mirror, finding himself at the mercy of its ‘Mirror Maiden’. > The apparent all powerful manipulator of its realm…’

How long have you been working on your project? *charlottezxz: Conceptually we have been working on it for 4 years which is hard to even fathom, however that’s more tinkering around the idea for the story and conceiving it as we learnt the engine. The blog itself is hitting its 4th birthday in February! Ressuflection’s development went on as i attended university, so its always been a side lined hobby of ours.Steam says 108 days worth of hours in the engine and most of the game progress other than concepts has been done in 2019. So I could say 4 years for the ideas/stories and concepts and a year of that for actual game making!

Did any other games or media influence aspects of your project? *charlottezxz: We each have our own inspirations, Lost Odyssey, Final Fantasy 9, Xenoblade Chronicles, Monster hunter and many older PSX titles such as Medievil, Tomba and Heart of darkness are great influences and inspirations to me personally. The dark, dangerous environments of Heart of darkness contrasted by some innocent characters, the monster designs in capcom’s franchise and the storytelling and themes with a cinematic approach to cut scenes found in some of FF9, Xenoblade and Lost odyssey, a lost game stuck in the recess of the xbox 360. There are many more but these spring to mind first and foremost. Narrow himself draws inspiration from games such as Earthbound, the Persona series and FF10!

Have you come across any challenges during development? How have you overcome or worked around them? *charlottezxz: We started the project in VX ace to begin with, until MV released. It was in Ace that I experimented learning RPG maker and in the early days of MV too. Although before Ressurflection’s time i also dabbled a bit in XP. MV seemed more in line for what we wanted, as i really wanted to try animating beyond SV sheets and do more, with Java being a bit more flexible and the scope of it being able to allow dragon bones later. However it hasn’t been without its hiccups! Part of that is the sheer amount of time you underestimate games and certain elements to take in their development. That and everything that comes with it, streamlining, trimming the fat...in the past week alone i spent days optimizing pictures, sounds and music in the game to cut down the staggering file sizes they were. So far they have retained their form without being as costly on the MB! Since I do the vast majority of the game development myself, everything takes a lot longer to develop. You underestimate all the little things to consider and that you may need later. By the end of development, I hope to have the vast majority of the game consist of custom assets and be able to truly call it something that is ours. Though that path is long ahead we won’t stray too far from it.

Have any aspects of your project changed over time? How does your current project differ from your initial concept? *charlottezxz: The game itself has always been a story-driven RPG at its heart, although certain game mechanics have been scaled down or developed further from puzzles to battle flow. As mentioned previously, the story has changed considerably which changed the direction of the overall narrative and gameplay as a whole. Certain characters and scenarios have been culled completely too. At its start the story wasn’t as heartfelt nor was the scope of the story all that big - Oh and the game had a time limit, a bit like Majora’s Mask! But it is a lot more meaningful now and we hope that you will enjoy it when the time comes.

What was your team like at the beginning? How did people join the team? If you don’t have a team, do you wish you had one or do you prefer working alone? *charlottezxz: It has been just myself and Narrow for the majority of the development but we reached a point where we wanted to reach out to find a musician for our game. We eventually came across Geoff who has done the majority of our music up until recently. However we have had friends help and contribute along the way such as Harry helping sprite some NPCs for me, Bart helping formulate and do some math balancing, Vaijack has also contributed to music making him our second musical boi and more on the way, our preliminary demo testers( it would take a little to list them all) and more peeps i’ll be sure to credit!

What is the best part of developing a game? *charlottezxz: For me it has to be conceptualising all the little ideas we have and bringing them all into being. This is especially so for any monster and character bois! I spend a lot of time visualizing and planning the design of areas, locales and creatures. Would this thing live here? Why would it be this way? If this is a historical town wouldn’t it have x and x? Then when we ultimately put it together, and all the pieces of the puzzle line into place and then you can just...experience, the final thing, that for me is the best part in developing our game for me.

Do you find yourself playing other RPG Maker games to see what you can do with the engine, or do you prefer to do your own thing? *charlottezxz: I learn best by doing, so more often than not I just dive into things, including the engine blind and tussle around with it. It’s a silly way of doing it, but I've often found myself learning more that way than following tutorials. Although in any game I've played, RPG maker or not, i do like to ponder and deconstruct scenes within them. The Witch's house, Pocket Mirror, Dreaming Mary, Mad fathers and Ib are all wonderful games that are great to learn from, dissect and understand what makes and made them tick. This applies across any game I've played or intend to play! I look at game making as one giant puzzle with lots of intricate little details that need to be solved, it’s more fun and engaging that way!

Which character in your game do you relate to the most and why? (Alternatively: Who is your favorite character and why?) *charlottezxz: There’s some characters I like a great deal, but i can’t talk about as it would be spoilers to the plot, that and it’s hard to pick any overall favorites. Charm comes across as a fun character to write for as she’s quite witty and sarcastic, the kind of dialogue that comes a bit too naturally to me. She’s a budding magical prodigy of the circus under the tutelage of Jerine. She bigs herself up a lot but isn’t quite ready to deal with the problems of the adult world just yet, as much as she strives to get into it. Then there’s the likes of Ashley as well, she’s the loudest circus member and a close friend to Zakai, its ringmaster. She’s a super hard working down to earth country girl who isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty and jump into the thick of things. Honestly I love all the cast, but there’s those two for now!

Looking back now, is there anything that regret/wish you had done differently? *charlottezxz: I would say ideally we should have had all our ducks in a row before we dove into development. My development style is very messy, especially since when we started development we had a lot of learning ahead of us. That combined with focusing on a lot of coursework and real life things meant I often forgot how we made things for consistency. This has improved considerably since i started getting more organised now, keeping lists and things tabbed for reference. My desk has bits of paper kept with it with information I need to retain. I forget far too many things for my own good, but now I'm taking better count measures! I would advise anyone to keep tabs of important information about your game such as consistent sprite style sizes, resolution size, x and y positions of certain things and important variables and switches.

Do you plan to explore the game’s universe and characters further in subsequent projects, or leave it as-is? *charlottezxz: There’s a few ideas bounced about to do side stories for some of the cast of characters in the circus, such as before they became one and the origins of how certain members joined the circus essentially the ‘First Stringers’ and ‘Second stringers’, these being those that joined afterwards. These would be great to do as small little episodes added onto the game post development, but currently they are just ideas and won’t be given too much thought until the game is either done or close to fruition.

What do you most look forward to upon finishing the game? *charlottezxz: My most hopeful thought is for people to enjoy the game and have as much fun and interest in it as myself and Narrow have had in creating it. It’s the kind of game we want to make and hope that the characters and story chime with people enough for people to see the journey through to its end! It’s a big scope of a project but i have endless enthusiasm for it, no matter how long it takes it will get out there at some point!

Is there something you’re afraid of concerning the development or the release of your game? *charlottezxz: That the games story and overall feel doesn’t quite hit the right notes, it's always a little back concern. From a technical perspective I would say that the game might have some oversighted bugs or critical crashes that slip under the radar or not run as smoothly on other PCs on release. We will do our best to optimise the game as much as possible for MV and squash those pesky bugs during testing, but it is on our minds often as a niggling fear.

Do you have any advice for upcoming devs? *charlottezxz: Gut everything from the base project that you know you most definitely will not be needing and give all your files smart tags and naming conventions. It would be great if MV allowed for sub folders, but it does not so naming your files smartly is key to finding what you need. Any of these files you know you will use often in certain ways, make them common events and call for those in events and cut scenes. This saves you mass editing them later. With naming conventions this could be Actor_1_Hurt or Chapter_1_NPC. Anything you want at the top of the list name it with _ to begin with. The bigger our project gets, the more important this has become for us and we hope it serves other inspiring devs well all the same.

Question from last month's featured dev @rojisroomrpg: How do you keep yourself happy and healthy when making your game? *charlottezxz: I’m normally a happy-go-lucky person, so I'm rarely not happy when working on Ressurflection. It's the happy little hobby I devote most of my spare time to. However, recently i would say my hands, wrists and neck have been hurting from spending a little too much time drawing assets and pieces for the game. Taking more breaks and spreading that time with other activities in between has helped to ease that pain and i would like to advise any dev to do so for their own health, including always having one or two bottles of juice, water or whatever beverage always at hand to sip at as you dev away!

We mods would like to thank charlottezxz for agreeing to our interview! We believe that featuring the developer and their creative process is just as important as featuring the final product. Hopefully this Q&A segment has been an entertaining and insightful experience for everyone involved!

Remember to check out Ressurflection if you haven’t already! See you next month!

- Mods Gold & Platinum

#ressurflection #gotm #game of the month #rpgmaker #rpg maker #rpg maker games #ressurflection game #gotm 2020 #2020 #february 2020 #february #indie games #games

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alarawriting · 4 years

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52 Project #9: The Timeless Tunnels of Crystal Station

Three people come down from the ships docked at Crystal Station. Hundreds of others do the same, but these are important. Focus on them--

Stepping down from a two-man ship, which is a shuttle from the starship Rhiannon, are the captain of Rhiannon and his best friend, Rhiannon's computer engineer. Matt Pison, human, terratype, Martian, is the captain. He is tall, blond, muscular from his life in the Martian colonies but pale from little sunlight, brown-eyed. Next to him is D'mir Colotho, draine, Bcoilica. He is short, corded muscle unusual for a draine, dark hair, dark eyes and brown draine skin. They are at Crystal Station, outside the boundaries of the Web of Eyes but still within the Alliance, to relax, refuel and restock. Nobody ever told them about Crystal Station.

Wardra knows. She comes down from her one-person cruise craft. Wardra Gyuunyushiligni, farla, Evstarb, with pale green skin, an upsweep of pink hair, lavender eyes. She is tall, thin, but more powerful-looking than the usual farla, with muscles in slender cords and the electric scent of power about her. Wardra knows the dangers of Crystal Station, but she has something to prove.

Crystal Station Central is a place bustling with people. It's a huge room, with milky crystal walls and twelve doorways leading from it. They all look identical, with opaque tracker fields hiding what they conceal behind, but for numbers over their doors. Eleven doorways lead to rest and recreation areas, stores, other such things. The things that people come to Crystal Station for, braving the dangers outside the Web because Crystal Station's prices are so much cheaper than anyone else's. One doorway leads to the mazes around Crystal Station, and that's why the prices are so cheap.

If the powerful ones in the Web of Eyes or the GalConfed knew of this link, Crystal Station would be destroyed. But they don't. No one listens to the mystic Evstarb farlae. And no one else who knows can speak.

***

Matt and D'mir head for a glowing information booth. Matt asks, "Information?"

"Yes," the booth answers.

"Where can I go to get my ship refueled?"

The correct answer is Doorway 12. Random numbers in the computer juggle. Not many have gone through Doorway 9 lately. Does this weigh the decision? No way to tell.

"Doorway 9," the Information Booth tells them. It has no face to keep straight. The faceless are the best liars.

Matt and D'mir go toward Doorway 9 with their fueling schedule as Wardra approaches another glowing information booth. She asks, "C'lianp?" She is about to ask the same thing as Matt. It's a different booth, but the same computer controls them all.

"Ad," the booth acknowledges.

"Hafar eszgi tram l'notla ofir?"

Random numbers in the computer juggle. Wardra is an Evstarb farla. Does this weigh the decision? No way to tell.

"Alfi 9," the C'lianp Inl tells her. It has no mind, and gives off no psionic telltales to be read by a mystic.

Wardra feels a tiny thrill of excitement. She has come here, despite the danger, to prove that she is not a coward. 1 chance out of 12, and if her gamble is successful she will get fuel cheap enough to see her into the Web-controlled territory, despite her limited funds. She will finally be free of Evstar, once and for all. But if her gamble fails... Shaking with excitement and more than a bit of fear, she heads for Doorway 9.

As she steps through the opaque tracker field that covers the door, an arrow of pain stabs through her mind, and she staggers and falls to her knees. Terror overwhelms her. Her gamble has failed.

Somebody pulls her to her feet. She looks up at Matt.

"Are you all right?" Matt asks. "What's wrong?"

He speaks GalConfed Standard. Though Evstar is outside the GalConfed, Wardra had always hoped to go to a world inside its domains, and so she learned Standard, though she speaks it with an accent. "I'm-- all right," she says, getting her balance. "I'm an Evstarb farla. That should explain it."

"I'm afraid it doesn't," Matt says, frowning. "I don't know much about farla, except for those in the GalConfed. D'mir?"

"Evstarb farlae are mystics," D'mir says. "They tend to have powerful psionic abilities. Most likely she sensed something unpleasant. What was it?" he asks her.

"You don't know?" Wardra asks. "That was the Barrier. Now that we've gone through the Barrier, we'll never be allowed to leave."

"What are you talking about?" Matt asks.

D'mir, being a draine, is quicker on the uptake. He presses a hand against the doorway. "It won't reopen," he says. His voice is calm, but then draine voices are almost always calm. "Does it block psionic transmission as well?"

"Yes." Wardra is shaking. On her homeworld they called her Jliga, coward, because she would not bear children. She left Evstar to prove she wasn't-- or to avoid the pressure to risk childbearing? Perhaps she is a coward after all?

"What are the two of you talking about?" Matt asks again.

"We can't get back," D'mir says. "The doorway is locked from this side."

"That's ridiculous! Why?"

Wardra takes a deep breath. "This place, Crystal Station, runs on the psionic output of-- things, creatures that feed on humanoids. They don't put out emanations if they're not well-fed. Crystal Station doesn't pay for fueling costs-- that's why everything is so cheap. Everyone who comes here pays in risk-- one out of every five hundred gets misdirected through this doorway. And those who get caught, like we did, pay in blood. There's a maze around Crystal Station, populated with these creatures. That's where we are."

"That-- they can't possibly get away with this," Matt says. "The Web of Eyes would‑‑"

"Crystal Station is outside the Web's range," D'mir reminds him.

"But-- we'd hear something. All those people disappearing--"

"People disappear from stations outside the Web all the time-- they're hotbeds for vice and crime. Unfortunately, if Crystal Station polices itself reasonably well, they can keep their disappearance rate under the average, even if one out of five hundred disappear." D'mir presses himself against the Barrier again. "There must be a way to bypass this," he murmurs.

"They get away with it because there's no proof. Nobody who disappears ever comes back out," Wardra says.

"So how did you know?"

"The Evstarb mystics can talk to the dead, sometimes."

"So why'd you come here? Why did you go through the doorway?"

"I didn't know what doorway it was, any more than you."

"Why don't the Evstarb mystics tell someone?"

Wardra smiles, bitterly. "Who believes farlae?"

"She's right, unfortunately," D'mir says. "All the other humanitypes, such as us draines, are genetically close enough to pure humaniform that we treat each other as if we're reasonably close to the same species. Farlae are usually treated as true aliens, and farlae from worlds like Evstar, that don't even make an attempt to fit in, are heavily stigmatized."

"Still, someone would listen," Matt says. "Did your people even try?"

"My people are narrow, short-sighted fools. And I am one of them. I didn't even think to warn anyone about Crystal Station."

There's not really anything Matt can say, in the face of her self-directed fury. "Well, there'll be investigations when D'mir and I don't come back. We're very important men-- I'm a starship captain, for god's sake. They'll have to investigate. My crew will tear this place apart looking for us."

"They won't find anything," Wardra says dully. "The computers are probably programmed to erase references to Doorway 9 from their banks."

"Then anyone I trained will wonder why no one ever goes through Doorway 9, and try to find out what it is," D'mir says.

"I'm sure they've thought of everything," Wardra says despondently.

"Hey! Don't give up hope so soon," Matt says, trying to cheer her. "D'mir, any luck with the door?"

"I could bypass it, but I don't have the tools."

"Can you jury-rig something?"

"I don't have the tools," D'mir repeats patiently.

"Is there any chance we can find the tools, somewhere in the maze?"

"I don't know what we're likely to find in the maze. I don't think it likely, but anything's possible."

"Well then. We've still got some hope. And we've both got weapons. We'll beat this yet. Come on."

"Come on where?" Wardra asks, fear in her face. "Where is there to go?"

"If we stand around like sitting ducks, something's sure to nail us sooner or later. We need to set up a secure base of operations, something we can defend, and start scoping out the place. I'm Captain Matt Pison of the starship Rhiannon. This is D'mir Colotho, our chief computer man, a draine from Bcoilo. And you?"

"Wardra Gyuunyushiligni. I have an independent cruiser-- I was trying to get into the GalConfed. That's why I came here, even though I knew about the risk-- I didn't have much money."

"Farlae outside the GalConfed aren't known for wanting to get in," D'mir says. "Why did you decide to leave Evstar and head for the GalConfed in the first place?"

"That, conv'ril, is a story too complicated and personal to discuss now."

Matt looks around. "I don't like being exposed like this. Let's go into the maze, see if we can find food, shelter, the works. They've got to feed us, or we'll die before we can feed their creatures."

And so they go. The halls are grayish-white in and of themselves, but the lights that shine on them are dim and faintly reddish, single bulbs poking out of the ceiling. Dust is everywhere, thick on the ground, turning the air musty and old. They pass alcoves with food dispensers, and Matt discovers that they can get packet rations-- tasteless chalky things, but nutritious-- from them. Finally they find a room with a lockable door, a water tap, and supplies all around, such as blankets and aged empty packets. There is a makeshift bed in the corner.

"This looks like someone made a shelter for themselves, left to get supplies, and never came back," D'mir pronounces, examining everything with sharp draine intellect. "Good."

"Good?" Wardra asks disbelievingly.

"There's no sign of a struggle in this room, and no filled packet rations. It looks like whoever it was was safe while they were here, and weren't attacked by the creatures until they left. I do have to say that I've seen no spoor-- no droppings or animal tracks."

"Maybe this isn't near where they live," Matt says hopefully.

"That doesn't make sense, unfortunately. This is near the doorway-- if the humanoids who come through that doorway are the only victims, and the only food, they'll have to forage out this far."

"Why couldn't we find a shelter nearer one of the food dispensers?" Wardra asks. "If it's dangerous to leave the shelter--"

"Did you see any rooms near the food dispenser?" Matt asks.

"No." Wardra shakes her head apologetically. "I'm sorry-- I don't mean to whine. It's the tension. How do we want to work this, then? Safety in numbers? Do we stick together when we go out?"

"Yes, at least for now," Matt says. "I can't think of a better way to do it."

***

They set up a makeshift camp, making three beds out of the spare blankets and depositing the food packets Matt had collected. Then they go out to explore, map out emergency routes, and try to find the tools D'mir will need.

As they pass by a food alcove, a thing screeches in. It is a flying beast, and yet it has no wings. It is like a huge black tube with rotating silver teeth. Set into its head is an eye, bright purple. Wardra drops to one knee, pulls out a gun, and blasts at it. The thing flips backwards, but keeps coming. It aims itself at D'mir. D'mir and Matt shoot lasers at it, but the thing keeps coming. Wardra's missiles hit it in its mouth and eye, repeatedly, and eventually it drops.

"That's an iver," D'mir says. "It's highly psionic, but slightly repelled by psi sources-- it prefers null-psi meals."

"Like you," Matt says.

"Yes. Like me." D'mir has gone gray and bloodless, but shows no other sign of the fear he must have felt. "Thank you, Wardra."

"What'd you hit it with?" Matt asks.

Wardra shows him her gun, an ancient projectile weapon. "Our technology isn't as advanced on Evstar," she says. "Does that mean you're psionic?"

"Not really," Matt says. "Most terratype humans have a slight psi rating, though, and draines typically don't have any. They're true nulls. Let me see that?"

He examines her gun, and hands it to D'mir. "What do you make of it?"

"The creature might be an energy-eater, capable of absorbing the lasers without damage. This would tear through its flesh."

"I also put push behind it," Wardra says.

"Push? What do you mean?"

"I-- called to it, mind to mind. I told it to die. I didn't put my full effort into it-- I didn't need to. But I think it helped."

"Told it to die?" Matt stares at her. "Could you have killed that thing with just your mind?"

"I don't think so-- and it'd cripple me to try, so I'm not going to unless it's an emergency."

"Do you have enough ammunition to kill another one without trying to kill it with your mind?"

Wardra examines her ammunition clip. "No." She puts it back. “I could kill it by feeding myself to it, but I think you’ll understand if I’d rather not.”

Matt laughs. “Of course not.”

“Farlae are poisonous to ivers?” D’mir asks.

“I didn’t know that was an iver until D’mir said so, but yes, that’s what we’re taught. It won’t save our lives – the things may be psionic, but they’re too stupid to know we’re poisonous. But if it makes a meal out of me, at least I’ll be avenged.”

“I’m not going to let it come to that,” Matt said. “We’re all in this together.”

***

The days pass without distinction, an endless river of unchanging time. Occasionally a scream is heard. There is nothing to focus on-- everything is the same.

They explore, sometimes, searching for weapons or tools. They find dead bodies, and plenty of energy weapons, and money and valuables, but no weapons they can use against the ivers, and no living people. Carefully they avoid running into the creatures, as best they can. When they're tired, they go to their room and talk.

Matt is convinced that the crew of the Rhiannon must be looking for him and D’mir, but how could they possibly guess the true nature of Crystal Station to even begin to look in the correct places? D’mir, bluntly, suggests that their crew probably think they are dead and spaced, or kidnapped and taken into slavery, somewhere far from the station.

They encounter another creature, not an iver. D’mir identifies this one as a neskelly. Imagine a crab, with octopus tentacles that it walks on, crab-like. Now imagine it the height of the average human. This one is more interested in Wardra than the human or the draine, and the venom in its tentacles disrupts her psi. Matt fires at it from a distance, but it seems to be bothered by that as little as the iver was. It ignores D’mir, so he is able to get in close enough to batter its head with the butt of his energy weapon, and when its mouth gapes open to bite him, he shoots it in the mouth. That actually works.

“Did we try shooting the iver in the mouth?” Matt asks.

“We hardly shot it anywhere else,” D’mir says dryly. “I suspected a thing like this would exist.”

“A giant crab-octopus thing?”

“A thing that would prey chiefly on beings with psi, rather than beings with none. If ivers were the only creatures in here, the Crystal Station algorithms would have never sent a farla in here.”

“I should have realized that,” Wardra says. “How many kinds of creatures do you think there are in here?”

“No way to guess,” D’mir says. “But we’ve seen a type that prefer psionic victims, and a type that prefer null-psi. I imagine there may be types that prefer low psi, like humans, or are completely indifferent to the level of psi their target has. A balanced ecosystem.” His voice doesn’t change, but a subtle shift in his face tells Matt, at least, that he is making the draine equivalent of a joke.

“We’ll have to be even more careful,” Matt says.

***

Time passes, and Wardra tells them finally of why she fled Evstar. When childbirth kills 1 out of 3 farla women, the remainder are pressured to bear all the more. It is her duty to her species to risk her life in childbirth. Wardra chose not to, and so they called her coward, and drove her from her homeworld.

Time passes, and Matt tells stories of his adventures, faring the spaceroutes of the galaxy, traveling amidst the GalConfed and the Zermiloni Demesne and the Ananranjan Net, all the worlds of the Orlon Alliance.

Time passes, and D'mir tells how he came to leave Bcoilo, where he would have had a promising career in the sciences, because he had a desire for adventure that the stolid, practical draines frowned on. And as the endless days and nights go past, it seems as if they have known each other eternities. As if they are soulmates, born to each other.

Then they find a dead engineer, with tools he obviously hadn't been able to use. As one, they recognize this as their chance. As one, they turn and run down the corridors, heading back for the Barrier.

***

As they approach closely, they begin to walk, unwilling to attract unnecessary attention. Before, they were in iver territory, and there it was necessary to move quickly. Here, those few marauding ivers still around will tune in on the sound of running feet more readily than in the deep areas of the maze, where more victims are to be found, searching hopelessly for a way out. They walk down the timeless tunnels of Crystal Station, tense and wary, watching for anything. There is hope in all their eyes, but fear as well-- because if this doesn't work, they are all doomed, sooner or later.

Wardra and Matt stand guard as D’Mir takes the wall apart, looking for anything that ties into the controls. “I wouldn’t expect to find the actual control board on this side of the barrier,” D’mir says. “They’d want it to be accessible to them, without risking being eaten, and they don’t want us to be able to access it.”

“So what are you going to do about that?” Wardra asks.

“The power conduits run through all the walls of the station, including these. The lights and the food dispensers wouldn’t work without them.” He locates a power conduit. “In addition, the engineers who need to perform maintenance over here would want to make absolutely certain they couldn’t accidentally be trapped, so there is a manual release for this barrier, somewhere. Controlled by a passcode, or perhaps even by removing a panel and completing a circuit, but wherever that is… either I’ll find a bundle of control wires passing through to the board on the outside, or it’s going to tap into the power conduits and provide a means of shutting the power down briefly.”

“Which way’s going to be faster to get the door open?” Matt asks.

“Whichever one I encounter sooner, which likely depends on exactly how they implemented it,” D’mir says.

“Well, take your time. No big rush,” Matt says, joking.

A third type of creature, which looks like a rolling ball with short spikes that flatten as they approach the ground and pop back up again as they roll off the floor and upward, attacks them. It’s not immune to energy weapons like the other two they’ve encountered, so Matt is able to make short work of it. Wardra saves what little ammunition is left in her clip in case another iver or neskelly or something else resistant to energy weapons comes.

The lights flicker and then turn off. “Now,” D’mir says, and Matt grabs Wardra’s hand and pulls her through the now nonexistent barrier, D’mir right behind him. The barrier flickers back on with the lights only seconds after they’re all through.

An alarm shrills.

“Let’s go!” Matt shouts, and runs, D’mir and Wardra right behind him, heading for the docking bay.

Crystal Station looks much like a wheel, from outside the station. There’s a circular central hub. 12 spokes come from this hub. Each, ostensibly, connects to the outer ring. Each also connects to a second hub-like layer, “above” the first in the orientation of the main gravity panels… though only one of the spokes uses that connection. From the central hub, there are staircases and elevators and person-movers and escalators leading “down”, below the hub’s floor, to the docking area, which sticks out of the base of the hub like the bottom of a muffin. So there are 12 doorways visitors can take when seeking the food, shops, hospitality and fuel sales kiosks in the outer ring – though one of those 12 will never reach that area. But the docking area is all one area, large and divided more by markings on the floor than anything more substantial. Matt and D’mir’s shuttle and Wardra’s single-person craft are both located there.

The fastest way to go is to take the escalator and run down it, but silver robots swarm all over the hub and cut them off from the escalator. These robots have wheels; they won’t be able to handle stairs, so Matt, Wardra and D’mir end up taking the stairs. It won’t save them from the robots in the long run; the robots can easily take the people-mover. But the goal is to get to their ships before the robots stop them.

D’mir stops at a computer terminal, removes an object from his pocket, and inserts it into a slot in the terminal. An image like a sphere appears, the color slowly draining from it as it spins.

Wardra’s ship has a fingerprint lock. She places her hand against the door. It does not open.

“Matt! D’mir! They may have overridden the locks on our ships!” she yells, and sees the robots come down off the people-movers.

“Of course,” Matt pants. “They can’t let us get away, knowing their secret.” He fires his energy weapon at one of the robots. It drops. There are people milling around, though, boarding or disembarking from docked ships, doing maintenance work, refueling ships, and Matt can’t get a clear shot at the other robots as they weave in and out of the crowd.

D’mir’s sphere has turned translucent and he’s typing frantically, the characters spelling out nothing that would make sense to anyone accustomed to the friendly interfaces of the computers. Bubbles appear all around him with additional information, and every so often he quickly glances at them and then returns to his typing.

Wardra can’t risk firing her gun when there’s so many people around, either. She bangs on her ship’s hatch. It still doesn’t open. Robots come rolling toward her, so she runs, knocking people in her way aside, but the bay is full of the robots and the outcome’s never really in doubt. She’s still got a wrench in her hand from the engineer’s tools D’mir used to take the wall apart, and she bashes one of the robots in its delicate light sensors, smashing its ability to see. But then the next one is behind her, wrapping long silver arms around her. She shrieks and curses and thrashes. None of this matters to the robot; it rolls into a faint green beam of light and follows the beam back to the people-mover, rolling back up toward the hub. Toward Doorway 9 and the monsters and the barrier.

The robots have now detected D’mir; presumably the fact that he wasn’t trying to get to a ship delayed them from recognizing him as one of their targets. He finishes typing, and the spinning sphere starts filling with color. Then he turns around, takes a step, and is immediately hugged by a silver robot. It, too, rolls toward the people-mover.

Matt manages to reach his ship, and shoots a couple of robots that get close enough to him that there’s no one in the way. He sees large docking clamps holding it in place, which hadn’t been there when he’d docked, and realizes – without D’mir to make the computer release the clamps, he won’t be able to get the ship to lift off even if he gets through the door. Still, if he can get inside, he can barricade the robots out and he can call Rhiannon for backup. There’s an emergency manual override for the lock, but as he flips the panel that hides it open, a robot grabs his arm and pulls him toward itself, wrapping the other arm around him as it does.

It rolls him upstairs on the people-mover, and toward Doorway 9. He shouts, the whole time. “Listen, all you people! Don’t take Doorway 9! Crystal Station is a trap! It’ll kill you! Tell the GalConfed, tell the Web of Eyes, somebody! Tell someone, it’s a trap! Don’t go beyond Doorway 9—”

Then it deposits him past the barrier, which flares blue, and now no one in the hub can hear him anymore.

The people who run Crystal Station are annoyed. It’s a good bit of work to mix up the doorways, and now they’ll have to do it again.

***

The three reconnoiter at the sanctuary they’d established. It looks no different than it did before their abortive escape. For D’mir, this is entirely expected, but for Matt and Wardra, it seems strange, as if they left far longer ago than this morning.

Wardra is angry at herself. “The Evstarbs were right all along. I am a coward.”

Matt blinks. “Exactly how do you figure that?”

“Did you hear how I screamed when that thing grabbed me?” Wardra complains. “Like a child. I should have shot it.”

“It was wise of you not to try,” D’mir said. “You would probably have hit one of the people, and at best you’d only have taken out one of the robots. There were too many for us to realistically fight. As for screaming… I’m a draine. I’ve been raised since infancy to be stoic and accept the things I cannot change. And I was tempted to scream when it grabbed me.”

“But you didn’t actually do it,” Wardra said.

“Wardra. Screaming because you’ve been attacked by a thing that might kill you, and does, in fact, take you back to a place where you have to face monsters to survive, is not cowardice by any stretch of the imagination,” Matt says. “It really doesn’t help you or anyone else to beat yourself up over something so trivial. You fought as hard as you could. That’s hardly cowardice.”

“It’s not particularly relevant in any case,” D’mir says. “What’s more important is that I believe I may have succeeded in convincing the computer systems to release our ships and the barrier in somewhere between 2 and 4 hours.”

“Really!” Matt says. “That’s excellent news!”

“Why not immediately?” Wardra asks.

“There is a power cycle,” D’mir explains. “I wasn’t able to determine exactly when the cycle should take place, but it’ll be somewhere between 2 to 4 hours from now. We’ll know exactly when it’s happening if the lights flicker. Power will fluctuate and weaken for five to ten minutes and then drop, because I believe I’ve delayed the cycle from beginning after the end of the previous one. We may have as long as fifteen minutes or as little as five to get through the barrier and get to our ships.”

“What about the robots?” Wardra is nervous. The robots plainly frighten her.

“If I can get to the computer before they get loose and intercept us, I can override the subroutine that sends out the robots. We’ll have to be ready to move the moment the barrier goes down.”

“Which means we’re going to have to be out there, in the open, waiting for the power outage,” Matt says solemnly. “Down between 2 and 4 hours from now means we’re going to be exposed for up to 2 hours, because we’re not going to have enough time if we’re here when it goes down.”

“It’s not ideal,” D’mir says.

“It’s actually awful!” Wardra says. “D’mir, I don’t have enough ammo to take down another iver.”

“That is a concern,” D’mir says, “but I wasn’t able to narrow down the window beyond 2.5 to 3.5 hours. So it’s actually only one hour, not two, that we’re going to be exposed.”

“But what do we do if an iver shows up?” Wardra asks.

“Whatever we can,” Matt says. “If D’mir is killed, he’s not going to be able to stop the robots.” He takes a deep breath. “We’ve been out for as long as an hour before without being attacked. We’re just going to have to hope luck is with us this time.”

***

They pass the time by telling stories about their lives, the same as they’ve done for the past – how long has it been? Two weeks? A month? Three months?

When it’s time, they head toward the barrier. They’re careful, never stepping around a corner until they’re sure it’s clear. They reach the barrier without problems, but now, they have to wait. Anytime within the next hour, the barrier might go down. Anytime within the next hour, they might be attacked by a creature.

It actually happens half an hour later.

An iver sails around the corner of the corridor, up ahead, cutting them off from any escape route. They’re up against the barrier and unless it goes down right now, the iver is going to reach them.

The barrier does not go down right now.

Both Matt and D’mir fire their energy weapons at the iver, knowing it’s not going to do a lot of good, but there’s not much else they can do. The shots affect it very little. Wardra empties her own gun into the iver, four shots. It bleeds and slows down, but it doesn’t stop. Cursing, Wardra runs toward the iver, holding her gun to use it as a blunt instrument, the way D’mir used his energy weapon against the neskelly.

The iver is much bigger than the neskelly was.

Matt runs at it with his own weapon, firing it directly into the thing’s mouth. “I’m going to try to hit the thing in the head with this!” he yells, brandishing the gun.

“Don’t be dumb, the iver’s much too big! My gun’s heavier!” Wardra reaches the back of the thing and tries to leap up on its back. The iver flicks its tail, smacking into her and throwing her into the wall.

D’mir manages to hit the iver in its eyes with the energy weapon. It blinks and cringes, but doesn’t seem to react beyond what an unpleasantly bright light would do.

Matt grabs one of the thing’s fin-like protrubances and pulls himself up, onto the iver. He bashes the back of its head with his gun, once, twice, three times. Then the iver flips upside down, dumping him on the ground, and then reverts to its previous orientation. Matt’s plainly stunned.

D’mir’s firing into the thing’s eyes over and over, but it doesn’t slow much. In another ten seconds he’ll be dead. Matt is trying to get to his feet but there’s no way he can get to D’mir in time.

Wardra’s had a chance to recover from being hit. She’s running toward D’mir and the iver, with farla speed, long legs covering the distance in moments. “You ne’harfda!” she screams at the iver. “Look at me!”

She flings her gun, and it hits the thing in the head. It turns, its mouth open wide, to face the threat it just detected, and she throws herself at its mouth.

D’mir rolls away. The iver crashes to the ground, its levitation gone, and it begins to convulse. It spits up a green broken thing covered with holes and white farla blood, a thing that used to be their friend.

It is obvious that nothing can be done to help Wardra. The logical, intelligent thing to do, the draine thing to do, would be to run from the convulsing creature, to ensure that Wardra’s sacrifice wasn’t in vain. Instead, D’mir waits for his moment, when the creature’s violent spasms have turned its head away from Wardra’s body. He charges in, grabs her body and throws it over his shoulder.

Matt reaches him. It’s been seconds. “Can we save her?” he asks.

“If the field goes down right now. If we get back to the ship and get her to the medical ward within ten minutes.”

The field does not go down right now.

The iver finally dies, poisoned by the parts of Wardra’s flesh it managed to tear off and swallow. D’mir and Matt sit with her body. Matt tears off his clothing to bandage her. D’mir does not. He’s already done something supremely stupid by draine standards, out of hope rather than logic. From his perspective, there is no longer any hope.

Eventually the field does go down, and they run. Matt carries Wardra’s body, drawing stares from the passersby at Crystal Station. D’mir’s going to need his hands free.

The robots get loose just as D’mir spoofs the credentials he needs to get into the system. They’re within meters of D’mir and Matt when D’mir manages to shut down the routine that commands them, and they roll back to the alcoves they came from.

The lock on their shuttle is released. Matt and D’mir climb into the shuttle and do not file a flight plan. Wardra’s body is strapped into a chair as if she’s riding with them. Matt pilots, D’mir watching the instruments as a second line of warning if Matt misses anything, because he’s on full automatic with no clearance from the station.

The station actually fires on them. Matt expected that they would when he first got into the shuttle. He releases chaff to draw the fire as D’mir raises shields to maximum. GalConfed ships, and shuttles, are designed for defense in a hostile universe. Crystal Station is unable to stop them as they shoot outward, toward Rhiannon.

***

Rhiannon is where they left it. The crew hadn’t been willing to move on before they’d completed their investigation into the disappearance of their captain and chief technologist.

D’mir asks the doctor if she can keep Wardra’s body preserved and restore it cosmetically – stop the bleeding, seal the wounds. Matt informs the GalConfed about Crystal Station. Rhiannon does not refuel there; they proceed to another station, more expensive.

That night, Matt does not sleep. This morning, he was a prisoner on Crystal Station, desperately looking for a way to escape, and Wardra was alive. Three weeks ago, he didn’t even know Wardra. Amazing how quickly everything can change.

He’s been staring at the walls, the ceiling, the clock slowly changing, for hours. He doesn’t think he’s asleep yet, but Wardra is there, sitting on the edge of his bed.

“I’m dreaming, aren’t I?” he says, and then is angry with himself, because telling himself he’s dreaming seems likely to wake him up.

“Yes,” Wardra says, “but I’m actually here. You’re not psionic enough to see me as long as your mind is taking in inputs from the real world; I had to wait until you had just fallen asleep to make you see me.”

“How?” Matt asks.

“Farlae can leave our bodies,” she says. “You’re seeing my spirit. I can’t show myself to D’mir; he’s got no psi at all. I need you to talk to him.”

“About what?”

There are tears on her face. “I am a coward. I didn’t want to die. I still don’t want to be dead. But what he’s doing won’t work. He can’t save me.”

Matt sits up, staring at her. “First of all, you just gave your life to save a friend. That, by definition, makes you not a coward.”

“But I was so afraid,” she whispers.

“Of course you were. Who wouldn’t be? Being afraid just proves you had a sense of self-preservation, not cowardice. You let that iver eat you to save D’mir.”

“And he’s consumed with guilt about it.”

Matt shakes his head. “He’s a draine. He knows it’s not reasonable to feel guilt because of the choice you made. He didn’t ask you to do what you did.”

“He’s trying to save me,” Wardra says, “and he can’t. And I don’t want him to try, because I can’t read his mind and he keeps his feelings off his face but I know he’s doing this because he feels guilt. Because it’s burning him up that I died to save him. Tell him it was my choice, tell him he has to let me go.”

“What is he doing?” Matt asks, and then realizes he is awake, the sound of his own voice still ringing in his ears, and Wardra’s not there anymore.

He gets dressed and goes to find D’mir. ***

D’mir is in sickbay. Wardra’s body lies cold on a table, in a sterile field.

“What are you doing?” Matt asks.

D’mir turns. He’s calm, no sign of emotion on his face, but he’s a draine. Matt knows better than to look at his face to see his feelings. His hands on his tools are the stark pale color of tightly clenched muscles cutting the blood circulation to the skin. “I’m trying to repair Wardra’s body.”

“Repair?”

D’mir nods. “I did some research. Farlae can create a psionic construct to house their consciousness and memories – they describe this in somewhat fanciful terms, claiming their spirits can leave their bodies, but it’s a fairly concrete and documented fact.”

“Do you think you can bring her back to life?”

D’mir turns back to his work. “Well, the problem with a psionic construct is that after the brain that created it is destroyed, it has no means of replenishing its energy. It’ll fade. Farlae traditionally cast their ‘spirits’, for lack of a more precise term, out of their bodies at the moment of death if they feel they have something they need to accomplish before that energy runs out – very similar to the human legends of ghosts that continue after death because of unfinished business in life, but I’m not sure any human has sufficient psionic energy to create one of these constructs in the first place.”

“That’s not what I asked, D’mir.”

D’mir does not face him. “Assuming that she created such a construct, and that the construct followed us onto the ship, and that I can successfully get enough of her body repaired with cybernetics that I can restart her heart and lungs, repair any brain damage, and prepare the body for the psionic construct to return to it… yes. Yes, there’s a small but non-zero chance that I can save her life.”

“You can’t save something that’s gone. You’re not talking about saving her life, you’re talking about restoring it.”

“It’s hardly some sort of fictional necromancy,” D’mir says. “If she didn’t, in fact, create a psionic construct before she died, there’ll be nothing I can do.”

Matt takes a deep breath. “She did. She spoke to me, while I was asleep.”

Now D’mir looks at him, startled. “Are you sure it wasn’t a dream?”

“Since she explained to me exactly what you just did… no, it wasn’t a dream. Apparently I’m just psionic enough that she can appear to me while I’m asleep. But she says that you won’t succeed at this, and that trying will just hurt you.”

“I cannot imagine a circumstance in which giving up on a friend causes less pain than trying to save them and failing,” D’mir says. “But if it’s possible, I’d like to know why she doesn’t think it will work.” He turns back to his work. “It’s the brain damage that needs to be repaired, primarily. A great deal of her body was damaged, but most of that can be replaced with cybernetics, and could even be replaced after she’s alive again. I’ve gotten her heart and lungs restarted; Dr. Pryhh can repair her gastrointestinal tract, and we can replace her damaged limbs easily enough. I’m optimistic about the restoration of her physical brain, and if her brain is restored and she still exists as a psionic construct… she should be able to return to her body and live. If she knows something about why that might not work…”

“I don’t know how to ask,” Matt says. “I can’t see her now; I was only able to see her because I was asleep. And while it’s still the middle of the night, I don’t think I’m getting to sleep anytime soon.”

“It’s theoretically possible that a state of meditation will allow Wardra to appear to you. The sensory data you’re getting from the world around you will drown out anything your rudimentary psi can show you, which is why she needed to wait until you were asleep. But if you were enter a state of deep relaxation and quiet your mind, she might be able to manifest to you.”

Matt does not know how to explain to D’mir that the vast majority of humans cannot possibly enter a state of deep relaxation and quiet mind if they’ve just been woken by the ghost of a dead friend, and have found out that their other friend is attempting to resurrect their dead friend as a cyborg. “I’m not sure I can do that right now,” he says diplomatically.

“Perhaps Dr. Pryhh can help.”

“It’s third shift, D’mir. Dr. Pryhh and everyone else on first shift is likely asleep.”

“Hmm. So it is. I hadn’t noticed.”

“D’mir, draines need sleep just like humans do.”

“True, but I can consciously choose to put off the need for another thirty hours if I need to. And what I’m doing is extremely time-sensitive. Even in the cold field, decay and apoptosis are continuing to do damage.”

Matt sighs. “I doubt I can stop you.” He could order D’mir to stop, but he doubts that would have any effect but to drive a wedge between him and his friend. Besides, what if D’mir can succeed?

***

When he sleeps again, Wardra appears.

“Why won’t it work?” he asks her, before she speaks.

“My body is dead,” Wardra says.

“I know, but he thinks he can resuscitate it. You.”

“You don’t understand. A dead body radiates no psionic field. I can’t just force myself into a body willy-nilly. The body has to have a psionic field for me to be able to merge with it.”

“He restarted your heart and lungs; can he restart your psionic field? I assume it doesn’t require that you be conscious and in control of your body, or it would disappear when you sleep, and that doesn’t sound healthy.”

“I don’t think he can.” She looks as if she’s crying, but there are no sounds. She doesn’t breathe, so there are no sobs. All there are, are the tears rolling down her cheeks.

“Can he at least try, Wardra? Or would that cause you suffering?”

She shakes her head. “It doesn’t hurt me, what he does to my body. It hurts to see him hoping, and trying, and I wish his plan would work, but I know it can’t.”

“Let him try, if you can,” Matt says. “He won’t forgive himself if he doesn’t try.”

“It won’t work,” Wardra says. “But he can try.”

***

In the morning D’mir is still working. “I believe I have most of the issues resolved,” he says. “Within the next hour, I’ll try running a low-level current through the brain to see if I can, in effect, restart it.”

“I spoke to Wardra again last night.”

“Did she clarify anything for you?”

Matt nods. “She says this can’t work because she needs the body to have a psionic field. Without starting up the body’s psionic field, she can’t merge herself with it, but she doesn’t think you can make her body produce a psionic field if she’s not in it.”

“That’s a complication,” D’mir says. “Captain. There are psionic enhancers. I don’t have any psi to enhance, but you do. If you were willing, we could set things so that you could speak to her while awake.”

“Do you think that will help?”

“If she can give me advice in real time, it might.”

And so they prevailed on Dr. Pryhh, who was awake now, to give Matt psionic enhancers. He could tell when they had taken effect, because he could see Wardra.

“I’m glad you can see me,” she says to Matt. “I won’t exist for very much longer. I’m sorry D’mir can’t see me.”

“Why won’t you exist for very much longer?” Matt asks. “Aren’t spirits eternal?”

“In your mythology, but farla spirits are real. We’re limited by thermodynamics just as everything else in this universe. There’s only so much psionic energy in this construct; without a body to anchor myself to, I’ll run out.”

D’mir had said something about that. “How long?”

“No more than a day, I think,” Wardra says.

He relays the information to D’mir. “I’ll know within a few minutes if this will work or not,” D’mir says.

He runs the current through the body. Nothing happens.

Another time. Nothing happens.

“It won’t work,” Wardra says. “A brain has to be alive to generate a psionic field.”

“Why do your people do this then?” Matt asks. “What’s the point of leaving your body when your body’s about to die, if there’s no way to return?”

“It’s not for living on after you’ve died; it’s for solving any problems that you were unable to resolve before you died.” She closes her eyes. “I shouldn’t have done it. I won’t exist long enough to see Crystal Station destroyed.”

“That’s what you wanted? To live on for?”

Wardra looks at him. “I’m a coward,” she whispers. “I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to end. I still don’t.”

“That doesn’t make you a coward. That’s normal. No one wants to die.” Matt reaches his hand out toward Wardra. “You don’t sound like someone who’s resigned to nonexistence. Tell me what we need to do to save you.”

“There isn’t—”

“A living mind produces a psionic field, right?”

“Some minds do. Farlae. Some humans. Draines don’t.”

In the real world, D’mir tries activating Wardra’s brain again. It still doesn’t work.

“You said you can’t enter your own body because it’s not generating a psionic field. But my mind is generating a psionic field.”

D’mir can hear Matt’s side of the conversation. He turns. “Captain, no.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Wardra says. “Your body is yours. Your brain is yours.”

“But you could. If you chose to.”

“I could enter your brain and merge this psionic construct with you, yes. And either I’d overwrite you, or I’d disappear into you, or we’d merge into a new being. There’s no way it could work to leave us both individual and safe.”

Matt shakes his head. “That’s probably true of farlae, but are you familiar with some of the strangeness of human brains? We can support multiple egos in the same brain. With access to different memories, different personalities, different skills. Some of us spontaneously create such egos, and live that way, multiple minds in the same body.”

D’mir says, “Wardra. If you can hear me, the captain is telling the truth, but that doesn’t mean what he’s suggesting will work.”

“D’mir. Stop,” Matt says. “This is my decision, and Wardra’s. Don’t try to talk her out of it.”

“I’m not going to do it!” Wardra cries. “I’m not going to be such a coward as to take your body and your life – even if we both could co-exist in your body, what kind of life would that be for the both of us?”

“Captain, if you sacrifice yourself—”

“D’mir.” Matt puts his hand on D’mir’s shoulder. “I know you want it to be you. I know you want to be the one to save her, because she died to save you. But you’re my friend, and so is she. If I could have sacrificed myself for you, I might have, but human flesh wouldn’t poison an iver.” He shakes his head. “But after everything we’ve all been through together…”

“Tell him I won’t do it. Don’t let him think I want to be this selfish,” Wardra says.

“She doesn’t want to do it because she thinks it’s selfish, and that she’s a coward,” Matt says to D’mir. “But she’s wrong.” He turns back to Wardra. “D’mir’s a draine. He can live with failing to save you, as long as he knows he tried. But humans are more emotional. I’m a starship captain; I should have had a better plan. I should have had some strategy for protecting us while we were waiting for the barrier to fall. I should have saved you.” He reaches toward her again. “If I know that now, I could save you, and I fail, again… how will I live with myself? You were afraid of D’mir destroying himself in trying to save you – but you’ve admitted that this could possibly work. You’re just more afraid of being thought of as selfish and cowardly than you are of dying.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” she says.

“I don’t think you will.” He comes closer to where her spirit stands.

“Have you thought this through, Captain?” D’mir says, and Matt hears emotion in his voice. Torn between saving the woman who died to save him, and protecting his captain, D’mir is starting to crack. “What if Wardra accepts, and the two of you do merge into one? Or her mind overrides yours? Or yours, hers? We don’t know what happens to a human brain when a farla psionic construct merges with it.”

“No, we don’t,” Matt says. “But I’m willing to take the risk.”

Wardra is crying. “Please stop. Please don’t offer me what I want if it’ll destroy you. I don’t want to be selfish.”

“You’re not,” he says. “You’re the most unselfish person I’ve met. I can only hope to achieve a tiny fraction of what you are.”

D’mir lowers his head. “Wardra, if you can hear me… he is correct. You are not selfish. You are not a coward. And if the captain is this determined to offer his body to you, so that you can live – refuse, if you wish, because you don’t want to live sharing a body with a human, or a man, or another person at all, perhaps. But don’t refuse because you think it would be selfish to accept.”

She squeezes her eyes closed, but it doesn’t stop the manifestation of tears. They aren’t real, after all. Imaginary eyelids cannot hold back imaginary tears.

“Please, Wardra,” Matt says, and she finally takes his hand.

***

Crystal Station still exists, but it’s been annexed into the Web of Eyes. Everyone who was previously employed there is gone, as are the creatures. The people who once ran Crystal Station may be in prison, or dead. Matt and Wardra don’t particularly care which.

They speak in different accents, they have different body language. D’mir has been able to tell the difference since the day Wardra took Matt’s hand. Other crew members found it hard to tell, at first. D’mir expresses amazement; how is it not obvious?

There are issues. Wardra finds it painful to be no longer farla. Having different genitalia and a different build doesn’t disturb her nearly as much as not being a farla. Her psionic senses are mostly gone; the drugs that let Matt be psionic enough to sense her are dangerous to humans if overused, so mostly she is limited to the very, very dull psionic ability of a human. She has never been comfortable around other people, and now her body is a starship captain’s, and she is surrounded by other people all the time, and she occupies a brain alongside another person.

Matt does not regret his decision, because it was the only way Wardra could live. But it bothers him as well, having to let another person who lives inside his head take control of his body sometimes.

It’s hard to live as one of two minds inside the same body, only able to interact with the world and be heard outside of one’s own head when the other permits. They try to be fair with each other. Wardra recognizes that she is a guest and defers to Matt; Matt doesn’t want to steal Wardra’s life from her after working so hard to give it back. But there is no denying that it is painful for both of them.

Wardra’s body is frozen in cold storage. D’mir hasn’t given up hope of getting the body working and somehow transferring her mind into it, someday. His friends are suffering and he wants to fix it, but there are things beyond the reach of anyone, draine, human or farla. He has brought up the possibility of talking to farlae – not Evstarb farlae, as Wardra would never tolerate asking them for help – but so far, she is uncomfortable with the idea and Matt won’t push her.

But there are those who lost loved ones to Crystal Station, who never knew what had happened, who have closure now. There are those who made the calculated decision to murder innocent people at random for the sake of greater wealth, and they have been brought to justice. And life is hard, but wasn’t it always? It’s harder now, but there are things to see and discover, people to help, acts to accomplish. Friends to talk to. It’s better than death and better than grieving and better than survivor’s guilt.

Space is dangerous and no one expects happy endings. The best anyone expects is the ending that lets you go on, after the story ends.

#52 project #science fiction #galconfed universe #farla

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